David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

That does not tally with what I am being told by hospital managers. Across the State, all of them, with the exception of the Limerick hospital manager because that hospital got a new modular unit, are saying that many of the beds the Minister talks about are beds that were temporarily open anyway. They did not get capital funding to build new units and they are being asked to cram beds into very tight wards, which is not what we need to be doing when we are in the middle of a pandemic as it is not good in terms of infection control. The Minister needs to be looking at all of those capital allocations that will make a real and tangible difference to those hospitals and provide the capital as well as the revenue funding, which he did not do in last year's budget or in this year's budget.

I did not say that there is nothing happening in the community. I welcome the community intervention teams, the community health networks and the additional home help services. My point is that we have not done that quickly enough and we are still not managing enough patients in the community. We are not doing enough community assessments as well. When you have problems in the emergency departments it is because everything else has gone wrong. There are so many things going wrong that, like a volcano, it erupts in the emergency departments. The people on the front line are telling me they have had enough. They genuinely dread and cannot sustain a winter without the capacity, tools and support they need.

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