Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Like the Deputy, I want to make sure that every child waiting for an operation gets it as quickly as possible. We need to acknowledge the extraordinary work that is going on across multiple sites by our healthcare workers. The main target was to increase radically the number of children who are getting this urgent surgery that they need. As the Deputy will have heard Dr. Green say on RTÉ recently and others, they are not only meeting all of those targets, they are exceeding them. One thing has happened that they were not expecting, which is that there has been a very high additional number of children referred into Children’s Health Ireland, CHI, partly from private practice and partly from Galway. Because of the additional unexpected number of children coming in, it will not reach the target of zero children by the end of the year. However, I am very happy to share with the Deputy the latest information from CHI. It will have gone from several hundred children at the start of this year down to fewer than 50 waiting more than four months by the end of December. Critically, it confirmed to me that it is on course for what we all want, which is every single child to be treated in less than four months.

See this speech in context