Michael Collins (Cork South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

West Cork has a crisis in SouthDoc. We have an ambulance crisis and a mental health crisis, and no one is responsible. The responsibility of the continued crisis is Cork University Hospital, CUH, lies with the Minister of Health, the previous Ministers and the HSE. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have continuously downgraded services at Bantry General Hospital and got away with it. They closed the overnight accident and emergency department in Bantry a few years ago. No matter how many people tried to explain the consequences, the Government did not give a damn. Now we find the injury unit in Bantry hospital having to close in the past two weeks if staff are sick. This is insane, meaning people from Ardgroom, Castletownbere, Ballydehob, Schull, going east to Kinsale, Clonakilty and Bandon having to go to CUH, which is overcrowded, for simple procedures. Is the Minister aware, as I am, that ambulances are being ordered to take patients to CUH, bypassing the state-of-the-art Bantry General Hospital for treatment of a small breakage in their bones? In some cases, people are going 130 km to an overcrowded CUH and in many cases - the Minister is not listening because the Minister of State, Deputy Butler, is talking to him - people wait hours in an ambulance due to the overcrowding when they could have been dealt with locally at home, within two hours. Why can the Government not get this right? The Minister of State, Deputy Butler, might listen to this part because it is for her. When she visits west Cork herself, she might explain the decision by the HSE to withdraw its appeal against the Mental Health Commission decision to close beds in Bantry General Hospital mental health unit last week. This will have enormous consequences for the people of west Cork and beyond. I accuse Fianna Fáil of being asleep at the wheel on this issue, so much so that its own Deputy in west Cork welcomed the news, if the newspaper that carried the article is to be believed. It is astonishing, to say the least, that this decision would be welcomed by Fianna Fáil. It paves the way for bed closures in the much-needed Bantry mental health unit, going from 18 beds to 15. To think the Minister of State, Deputy Butler and the then Taoiseach, Deputy Micheál Martin, were at the hospital promising more services last year. This is due to a lack of investment by this and previous Governments. This is at a time when mental illness is at an all-time high. When this was first announced last September, I pleaded with the Tánaiste and the Minister of State to intervene. I now plead with her again, and the Taoiseach this time, to intervene that there would not be a loss of beds in Bantry mental health unit.

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