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

It must be about a year since I saw an exasperated hospital consultant refer to trolley conditions in his emergency department as the warehousing of patients. In the time since, the situation has got even worse. I think I saw him again over Christmas saying the exact same thing.

Before I go any further, I want to thank the hard-working staff at Naas General Hospital who continue to work in overcrowded conditions that are too frequently appalling. They know better than anyone that the dysfunction in the health service is getting wider and deeper, while the way they are treated as workers goes from bad to worse. We have heard it from the non-consultant hospital doctors who are being driven to distraction by the way they are being treated by their employer, the HSE. When I talk to comrades from the North, no matter how bad the NHS is, they talk about it with respect. The people love it and the workers in it love it, but people who work for the HSE have had enough. I will stand with the workers in the HSE in their fight for better and more humane conditions. Let us face it: there is something incredibly selfish about treating the people we depend on to heal us and our loved ones so carelessly and so badly, with no regard for their well-being. That has to change. If enough people decide they want a change of Government, it will change.

Sinn Féin has a multi-annual plan to tackle capacity, be it capacity in beds, diagnostics, surgery, both acute and elective, or medical personnel.

We need change urgently in the HSE. Many of our healthcare workers want to stay and build their careers, have their families and live their lives here, which they would do if they were treated better in their conditions so that they could rent a home at a fair price, depend on public transport and have a decent life without breaking the bank. None of that is looking for too much. All of that is achievable if we put people first, value for public money first and public services first rather than a private, for-profit approach. It is achievable if we had a government thinking in terms of the economy and society, and not just the economy alone.

Despite the Taoiseach's musings that more beds might be bad for how hospitals work, the people out there, including all medical staff, know that is pure nonsense. It is difficult to hear him say that it is not just a question of getting beds in; that they must be staffed. We know that. He should stop treating the people like fools. We need more capacity to take our growing population into account. We need more hospital beds. We need at least 800, be it in acute hospital or community settings, before next winter. We need more doctors and nurses, and all the allied healthcare professionals to make sure that we make the best use of them to get the best health outcomes for people, patients and staff alike. Above all, we need long-term planning and joined-up thinking, and we need to retain the medical staff we have.

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