Réada Cronin (Kildare North, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The HSE and the Department of Health management has eye-watering salaries and the perpetual luxury of learning lessons. In the week of Vicky Phelan's death we learned there has been no retrospective review of cervical slides for the past four years, despite recommendations to do so. This morning we learned that Tusla has spent €400,000 - nearly half a million - without tender, on a company managing information that is being withheld from the people it is about.

The lessons supposedly being comfortably learned are being lived extremely painfully by the citizens. My young constituent, Jack, was hospitalised with Covid - the same infection - for the third time in Crumlin hospital. This young non-verbal boy with Down's syndrome and additional multiple needs was left on a trolley for two days and two nights. This is an unacceptable trauma for Jack and his mam, Aisling. It is hard to imagine we are doing trolley counts now in children's hospitals. Where is the infection control for a child with Covid on a trolley? How many other children were put at risk because Jack was treated so disgracefully? Spare us the comfy lessons. Where is the real action plan for a functioning health service in this Republic?

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