Michael Collins (Cork South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Ceann Comhairle. I have no doubt that after the easing of the Covid-19 pandemic that the biggest crisis that this country will have to deal with will be health and waiting lists. At the present time we are shockingly ill-prepared for the crisis which leaves many questions hanging over the head of the Minister for Health.

I ask the Taoiseach to look at his own county and the shambles that health is in at the moment in west Cork. Hundreds of people are going to the North for crisis operations as they have no other choice. During the summer, we saw the shocking handling of Bantry General Hospital, which is west Cork’s only general hospital and serves up to 90,000 people living in the area along with tens of thousands of visitors. Accident and emergency admissions were closed for 16 days due to a lack of staff. This was flagged three years prior to this but due to major incompetence on the part of the HSE it was not addressed until the HSE was pulled, dragging and screaming, through the streets of Bantry by the great people of west Cork in a public protest. The HSE then woke up and reopened the accident and emergency unit. During all this time, the Minister of Health was nowhere to be found. It looked, yet again, like another Minister was asleep at the wheel.

SouthDoc services in Castletownbere and Kinsale are now non-existent. Imagine the people of Ardgroom, Allihies, Adrigole, Urhan, Glengarriff, Castletownbere and Lauragh in south Kerry spending every night without a proper out-of-hours doctors service unless the day doctors in Castletownbere continue to work by night. It is shocking to ask anybody to work day and night. This is coupled with a crippling ambulance service in west Cork. The Castletownbere ambulance, which one of four in west Cork, now spends its nights in Kerry. The Clonakilty ambulance is now dubbed the Cork city ambulance. Every night during the week, the other two ambulances are in every other part of the country but west Cork. As a result, car accident victims in west Cork were recently left by the roadside for two hours and 45 minutes and two and a half hours, respectively, with gardaí and fire personnel to care for them.

We had a suspected stroke victim in Schull recently, where efforts were made to source an ambulance from another county. Another person near Skibbereen passed away while waiting for an ambulance from another county. This leaves ambulance staff, fire brigade staff, doctors, gardaí and suffering patients and families astonished as to how this is allowed to happen.

All of this has happened over the past two months on the Taoiseach’s watch. If this were not enough, CoAction has now decided to close its community houses in Castletownbere and to move loved ones with intellectual disabilities to Skibbereen and Bantry, which is nothing short of heartbreaking. Again, the excuse is lack of staffing. This is the same excuse that was used for Bantry hospital recently and for SouthDoc. Now, the most vulnerable in our community will have the doors in their community homes - some of whom are in their 50s, 60s and 70s - shut in their faces. This is another astonishing attack on the vulnerable people of west Cork.

Can the Taoiseach tell me why Bantry hospital was allowed to close its accident and emergency unit at the busiest time in August of this year, why there is no SouthDoc out-of-hours service in Castletownbere and Kinsale and why there are no ambulances in west Cork on most nights of the week? Can the Taoiseach personally intervene with CoAction to prevent many heartbreaks with the closure of the CoAction homes in Castletownbere? I may add that the funds for these homes were raised by local people.

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