Pauline Tully (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

A large proportion of the people who live in the part of my constituency that is in north Meath, including in Drumcondra and Kilmainhamwood, and in parts of east Cavan avail of the services of Navan hospital but, unfortunately, successive governments have been attempting to shut down the service in Navan for years under the small hospitals framework. This has resulted in a lack of investment in emergency and critical services in the hospital despite the significant increase in the population of Meath during this time. This should sound familiar to many on the Government benches because it is exactly the same scenario that occurred with the downgrading of services in Monaghan Hospital in 2009 after years of community opposition and when Fianna Fáil and the Green Party were in power. Fine Gael has been in power since 2011 and there has certainly been no rollback or reversal in the policy of downgrading local hospitals. The downgrading of Monaghan Hospital had an obvious detrimental effect on the people living in Monaghan but it also had an extremely negative indirect spillover effect on hospital services in Cavan and Drogheda, both of which had to deal with a massive increase in patient numbers without the proportional investment needed to ensure safe continuity of services.

One of the arguments made in a Government report at the time of the downgrading of Monaghan Hospital was that local hospitals were not generating enough emergency work to justify a full team of consultants on the doorstep. It instead recommended a new regional hospital to be located in the southern part of the north east. Ironically, the location for this was to be Navan. Some 13 years later, there has still been no new regional hospital built in Navan or anywhere else to service the north east, the services in Monaghan have been downgraded and it is now proposed to downgrade services in Navan. This cannot be allowed to take place again. It would be devastating for the people of Meath and would also, once again, have major repercussions for services in Cavan and Drogheda. What is needed instead of the continued downgrading of local hospitals is investment in our public health services. The people of Meath have been battling for more than a decade to save their hospital services. It is time for the Government to commit to protecting and enhancing emergency and critical services at Navan hospital and in the wider north-eastern region.

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