Rose Conway-Walsh (Mayo, Sinn Fein)

The Minister can hold up whatever document she likes, but I am telling her that there are not enough staff in Mayo University Hospital in the emergency department section to provide safe service there. I am also telling the Minister that it is a deterrent for so many people who want to, and probably need to, go to hospital. They want to do everything to stay out of hospital. Those nurses and other staff members are absolutely run off their feet. They are expected to operate on a corridor with trolleys each side of it, patients in pain moaning, looking for help and trying to get a bed when they cannot get a bed, yet the Minister is telling me the hospital has enough staff. It does not have enough staff. I can tell the Minister that. I am very grateful for the service the staff provide but there is not enough of them there. Whatever the Minister is doing, I ask her to please address that and to look at it. I was not even going to bring this up but the Minister saw the women in the Public Gallery last night for the endometriosis care motion. The Minister pointed out phantom clinics they were to go to in all these places and implied there were so many services about the place that they just were not going to.

Why then are those women in such pain? The Minister spoke about them choosing to go to abroad when the services are not here for them. The Minister can shake her head all she wants but she needs to recognise what is happening on the ground. The health of the women who were here last night is deteriorating. The organs in their bodies are being eaten by endometriosis and the Minister is saying there are enough services and support.

See this speech in context