Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein)

I thank the Minister of State, but it does not give me any confidence. In the last line of his response he said, "I would like to reassure the Deputy, and all patients... in the mid-west, that this Government is fully committed to improving health services in the region." I have received the same reply since 2016 when I first started raising this nine years ago. The fact remains that we have record numbers of people attending University Hospital Limerick, with June of this year having the highest June number ever. The Government's plan will not address this issue.

I am not sure if the Minister of State is aware that the second 96-bed unit that he mentioned has been referred to An Coimisiún Pleanála. That means we will face at least a two-year delay on that one. I would like to know what the Government intends to do in the interim as we plough through the An Coimisiún Pleanála delay on that. People are entitled to object to planning applications if they want but this will cause chaos in Limerick because we were depending on this 96-bed unit being delivered sooner than that. This will potentially add two years on to that. What will the Government do in the interim to solve the problem we have?

The sum total of the Government's plan to solve the crisis is to introduce a few additional beds, which is not really good enough. It is talking about 2028, in three years' time and potentially two years later than that. In Limerick city and county, where the Minister of State lives, the people he and I represent cannot wait that long. We need immediate action that treats the situation with the urgency it deserves. In recent weeks an average of 100 people per day have been on trolleys and the hospital is simply not designed for that. We have had a new emergency department since 2017. It was never designed properly for the numbers presenting to the hospital. The UL Hospitals Group advises that a minimum of 400 beds are needed and even that number does not consider the projected growth of population in the mid-west region which we all know will grow exponentially. The figures the Government is offering are dramatically short of what is needed in University Hospital Limerick. I do not get any comfort from the response the Minister of State gave and the people in Limerick and the mid-west will not get any comfort either.

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