Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)

We are fully committed to UHL. We are fully committed to the mid-west. Let us hope this term of this Dáil signals a new dawn in terms of moving forward on the HIQA report.

The last Dáil was about commissioning HIQA reports but that is all done now. I agree with the Deputy. We do not need a whole load of palaver around next steps. We need the Minister to do her job, which she is doing extremely well, and to report back to Government by Christmas. That is her intention and she is fully supported by everyone in the Government and, I think, by everyone in the Opposition in making that progress. We have increased the budget of UHL very significantly, from €265 million in 2019 to €507 million last year. We have increased the number of staff and are putting in the bed capacity.

I do not want to overly agree with the Deputy in case I kill his street cred but his overall point about infrastructure delivery is right. Things are taking far too long. There are simple things we can do and intend to do. There will be proposals from Government on this by the end of the month. One is to move processes in parallel. We do not need to wait for full planning permission to prepare procurement. Processes need to move in parallel. You can save a significant amount of time. We will also need to see emergency legislation in this House on the delivery of critical infrastructure. If the Government and the Opposition really want to get things moving, we should work together on that in the time ahead.

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