Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (Cork South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am very worried about what we are going to see this winter and in the coming years. This debate is not academic. We should not forget how profound are the impacts of underfunding, bad policy and mismanagement.

There are people out there tonight who will pay a heavy price for that. Underfunding will result in more sick and vulnerable people waiting on trolleys in crowded corridors. Underfunding will mean people with a whole variety of conditions having to wait and wait for their procedure while they are debilitated in pain at home with their life on hold. Underfunding will mean more elderly people and pensioners in their eighties being forced to wait on hospital chairs for days while waiting to even get a trolley. That is the truth of it. Ní cinneadh é seo gan tionchar. Beidh tionchar trom aige seo ar dhaoine.

It should not be discounted the chilling impact that the Minister's policies will have on our medical professionals abroad who are thinking of coming home. So much has been said about nurses and doctors in Australia and in the Middle East. We now have the farcical situation where even if they wanted to come home there might not be a position for them. There are 86,000 people on waiting lists in Cork. I have little faith that this figure will come down when we see the raft of cancellations: 954 in the Mercy University Hospital in one quarter; 419 in the South Infirmary Victoria Hospital; and figures not available for Cork University Hospital, CUH. The latter is a crucial centre for the region and has very ambitious plans for the coming years in the form of: a regional paediatric centre; the CUH cancer centre; and a 24-7 arterial emergency vascular service. How can it and other hospitals pursue that ambition and how can it proceed to recruit staff when this is what the Government budget has allowed? Record cancellations of appointments is shifting the burden onto the ever-growing waiting lists.

See this speech in context