Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

It took years to make the rehab unit state of the art. My own family benefited from it. It has been closed down to benefit the private hospital to justify the Minister's contract that we never saw because it is commercially sensitive. To try to understand this, really it is like something from Kafka. We put its public patients into a private hospital. It is mind-boggling. I am not here to blame but I am certainly here to have a better public health system, as well as better public housing. That simply is not happening, however. We have more of a language that is twisted and turned.

How do I explain to people in Galway that the rehab unit in Merlin Park is closed down while some of its patients are in the Bon Secours Hospital? By its own admission, the Bon Secours Hospital is not set up as a rehab centre. We have nurses from Merlin Park going into University Hospital Galway every day, going from ward to ward with no sense of building up a relationship with patients.

I have five seconds left so I will leave it. I have made my point and the Minister might come back to me about the specific issue.

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