Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputies Gino Kenny and Wynne. I thank the Independent Group for this motion. I want to take the opportunity to ring the alarm bells about what has been happening at Tallaght hospital emergency department. For over a week now it has been in an extreme crisis situation. The full capacity protocol has been in operation. People have been waiting for more than 24 hours to get a trolley. It is a really horrendous situation for patients and for the staff. I will read some of the messages I have received from people who have relatives in the hospital. Someone wrote to me one evening in the course of the last week saying their partner who suffers with Crohn's disease was taken by ambulance one morning at approximately 11 a.m. to Tallaght University Hospital. He had a viral infection. His immune system had a vulnerable infection which was now in his stomach. He was put on antibiotics and had a CT scan and chest X-ray. He was told he would be put on a ward at 1 p.m. the next day but a day and a half later, he was still sitting upright on a chair in the emergency department in agony with stomach pains. I have another message from someone saying, "I am here with my daughter in Tallaght hospital from 2 p.m., now it is 9.30 p.m., nobody cares, she is very bad." A journalist, Suzanne Kane, posted about it on social media. She says our hospital system is "so incredibly broken" and "Tallaght hospital the past few days is like nothing I have ever experienced. When you're so sick and they're so stretched, there's people everywhere, no beds, trolleys, no space. We are lucky that there are so many unreal people working in our hospitals but they are on their hands and knees." That sums up the attitude of people who are extremely appreciative of the incredible work being done by workers in our health service but see that the whole system is absolutely creaking, at the expense of the patients and the staff.

This is not the first time the full capacity protocol has been triggered in the last number of months in Tallaght hospital. It happens again and again. At the bottom of this, the underlying issue is that of capacity in our health service and in particular the absence of beds. In the early 1980s Ireland had 17,500 hospital beds in our health system. Today we have just over 11,000. We have the same number as we had in 2009 when we had a population that was half a million lower than it is now. We have almost half as few beds per capitaas the average across the EU. At the same time, the private health operators are making massive profits. Larry Goodman's Blackrock Clinic reported a doubling of profits last year. The two of those things are related. We need investment in our health service.

See this speech in context