Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

A number of Sundays ago, a gentleman suffered a cardiac event and was resuscitated on the ground outside University Hospital Waterford, UHW. Even if he had been inside UHW, a model 4 hospital in our great Republic, he could not have accessed cardiac care as the cath lab was closed, which it is 129 hours of every week. Sadly, that man passed away two days later in UHW. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam. Where is the 24-7 cardiac service the Taoiseach promised the south east?

The Taoiseach extols his Government's capital spending programme and the hundreds of millions spent in Cork delivering a new airport runway, two new €100 million teaching blocks for University College Cork, UCC, the new convention centre and the Dunkettle interchange. Contrast this with how Waterford has been treated. There has been no capital budget approved for the South East Technological University and a review of a land purchase to add to the Waterford campus footprint has now been going on for 14 months. While UCC is granted a new school of medicine, the engineering buildings promised to Waterford Institute of Technology in 2012 have been deferred to 2026 or later. The Taoiseach's Government has starved our airport of regional aviation funding, threatened the retention of our air-sea rescue service and offered nothing to address the 20-year-old problems of the N24 and N25 road networks in the south east. However, it is the obstruction of capital funding for University Hospital Waterford that offers the greatest insight into the denial of 24-7 services for the south east.

I wish to respect the House's long-standing convention of not making charges against persons here under privilege but I need to balance that convention against my responsibility to identify the sharp practice with regard to the capital and clinical resourcing of UHW by the Cork-based South/South West Hospital Group. Lies are being told regarding the present strategic development of capital and clinical resourcing at UHW and those responsible must stop or be stopped. A recent three-year national study on heart attacks allied with three years of blue light patient transfer data makes the case for 24-7 services for the south east clinically unassailable, yet the Government chooses to ignore this information, preferring to jockey and await the further steered reports required to give it the answers it wants to provide it with the political cover it seeks. Such actions reveal an implicit understanding that the private and public patient streams and numbers of students that flow out of the south-east region and sustain the medical and academic privilege of Cork and Dublin must never be threatened or diminished by competition.

The Taoiseach's Government is abandoning his backbenchers in the south east, just as he has abandoned his promise to deliver 24-7 cardiac care to the south-east region. They will have to answer to the electorate. Without political redirection, I predict that the ballot boxes of the south east will bring a heart-stopping arrest to the political careers of many of the Taoiseach's colleagues in government and in his own party, Fianna Fáil.

See this speech in context