Kathleen O'Meara (Labour)

I, too, call for an urgent debate on the Hanly report published yesterday and finally delivered to us last night, many hours after the media received it. I call for such a debate in order to ask the Minister for Health and Children to think again. The proposals in the Hanly report will mean that these so-called centres of excellence, these 12 regional hospitals, will end up like the Mater and Beaumont Hospitals with patients being treated on trolleys. The reason is simple. If one closes Nenagh hospital accident and emergency, 11,000 people will go to Limerick. That is not parochialism; that is a fact. It is the wrong way to go and we need to tell the Minister that. We need to get this report back to square one and put care back into hospital services.

I support the calls for the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform to come to the House to discuss the escalating and serious problem of crime and the sense that it is getting out of control and to ask him a serious question about his attitude to the media and the reporting of crime following his remarks during the recess.