Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I want to start by offering my condolences to the family, friends and loved ones of Aoife Johnston. I have read sections of the report and your heart would break in half listening to what happened to her parents. It must have been awful. As the report said, the family felt powerless amid all of the chaos of accident and emergency all around them. My grandmother died in accident and emergency and it is not an appropriate place to grieve the loss of a loved one. My grandmother had lived a very good life and had her family. Aoife Johnston's life was only starting. The grief her parents, friends and family must feel is, quite frankly, unimaginable. The hope is that some good may come and some lessons might be learned, but this is crisis is not something that has emerged in recent times.

Before I came in here, I was looking back over coverage of previous times. Back in 2009, when Ennis, Nenagh and St. John's emergency departments were closed, I was the national nursing officer for SIPTU, along with Mary Fogarty, who was and still is the INMO representative for what was the Midwest Regional Hospital, now UHL. We lobbied Ministers very heavily, among them James Reilly. There is turn and turn about; it is Fine Gael's turn one day and Fianna Fáil's the next. They support each other. We lobbied James Reilly in the first instance.

We thought that conditions were intolerable. I spoke to members I represented at the time and they described the conditions as being like a war zone. In the intervening time, it has only gotten worse. I want to use some of my time to talk about the people who are working in those conditions and are, in effect, along with the patients, at the business end of the policies and failures of successive governments. When hospitals and accident and emergency departments are overcrowded, patients suffer and die and staff are assaulted. We know this. The conditions that staff are working under are unimaginable.

Every promise that has been made from James Reilly to the Taoiseach, Deputy Harris, and the current Minister, has been broken. I am sure the Minister will forgive people if they take with a pinch of salt any promises he might make here today. I urge the Minister to not just accept the motion or simply nod it through. I urge him to act on what is in it . If he is not prepared or able to do that, I respectfully suggest that he make way for a Minister and Government that will.

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