Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am someone who participated in and lived through that era. It is appropriate someone of that vintage should make some comment. I was a member of a health board during that entire period. I was also a Government backbencher during quite a lot of that period. I remember it well. I have no difficulty at all in recollecting it and the way things happened. It is now being presented as a strategy to deprive people; it was not. It was a policy to attempt to accommodate people who had no hope of getting accommodation and had no accommodation available to them anywhere. As long as public hospitals, with spaces, were available in places such as Naas, Athy and so on and so forth, with a need for more, those hospitals were able to accommodate those patients for as long as was necessary. A number of other places, such as Peamount Hospital, did the same thing.

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