Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

I wish to express my deepest sympathy to the family and friends of Aoife Johnston. Her death was a catastrophic disaster for her family and friends. Aoife was 16 years old when she died. Incredibly, she had to wait 12 hours in hospital before receiving treatment. Reading the report issued by Mr. Justice Clarke, it is incredible what happened in that situation. Aoife was triaged as a category 2 patient, meaning she should have been seen in ten minutes. However, due to the volume of patients in that location, it was ten hours before she was actually seen.

Even when she received her appointment with the doctor, it took a full hour for the antibiotics to be given to her. Sepsis can be treated very simply with antibiotics. In 2022 in Ireland, antibiotics that would have saved Aoife's life were withheld from her. That is an absolutely disastrous situation under the current Government. Mr. Justice Clarke's report is incredible in how it speaks about this. It refers to the emergency department as grossly overcrowded, with a complete lack of clarity on sepsis protocols. It goes on to state there is a risk of recurrence. Therefore, it is not that we have learned from what has happened in the past and made sure it would never happen again; it is that there is currently a risk that it could happen again in the exact same location. That is a damning indictment of the management of the hospital from the Government's perspective.

It is really important to state that the current overcrowding in hospitals is a direct function of Government actions. The Green Party and Fianna Fáil closed Ennis and Nenagh hospitals in 2009. They made a decision to close down those hospitals even though the Horwath report stated there was not enough capacity at UHL to deal with the additional patients who would go there. There was a reckless decision made by the Fianna Fáil–Green Party Government in 2009 to close the hospitals. Everybody is talking about accountability at the moment but I do not see any in these decisions.

What really frustrates me, as chair of the Save Navan Hospital campaign, is that exactly the same efforts were made to close Navan hospital in the same period. Indeed, HIQA had a hit list of nine hospitals that it sought to close. It was dressed up by the Government that this was being done for the best possible reasons, namely that there could not be a hospital at every crossroads, that we were going to have centres of excellence and that the patient would be safer in the long run. That is certainly not the case. There were no centres of excellence created; there were centres of trolley counts created. No extra resources were put in place to deal with the additional people coming from the affected locations. Right now, it is HSE policy, in black and white, to close Navan hospital emergency department. That is the current policy of the Government. Not only has it learned nothing about extra capacity at Limerick hospital but it is still the Fianna Fáil–Green Party policy to close emergency departments in this State. This is quite horrendous. We thank our lucky stars in Meath that tens of thousands of people came out in their droves, in march after march. Our area would be in exactly the same position as the mid-west region if it were not for the campaign.

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