Denis Landy (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House and thank him for taking this debate on Our Lady's Hospital, Cashel. In 1996, an agreement was signed with the South Eastern Health Board by those concerned at the hospitals in Cashel and Clonmel to move services from the former to the latter. In return, the three-storey Cashel hospital would be upgraded through the provision of 25 specialist and geriatric beds, 15 nursing home and convalescent beds, 20 beds for general practitioner, GP, assessment and rehabilitation and five palliative care beds, a total of 65.This was in 1996. One of the people involved at the time, Councillor Tom Wood, from Cashel, is still trying to get beds into the hospital in Cashel. We will roll the clock forward to the last Government's term of office. Two phases of refurbishment of the building of Our Lady's Hospital were undertaken. One was a new reconstruction at a total cost of €10.15 million and the second phase was the main building, which I am discussing now, on which €12.6 million was spent. The final services were transferred to Clonmel in 2007. These were the acute services and at that time the commitments were reinforced again. However, in January 2015 there were still no step-down beds opened in Cashel by the HSE.

This issue has been raised regularly. In 2015, the then Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, former Deputy Tom Hayes, announced 21 step-down beds to relieve the chronic overcrowding in Clonmel, which has been ongoing for the last number of years. It is now 5 July 2016 and there are still no step-down beds in Cashel, after a total of almost €23 million of taxpayers' money being spent on Cashel hospital for what is operating there and on the main building. There is no return by way of beds for the public and those who are distressed by overcrowding and family situations in Clonmel. It is time to raise this question again and seek a response from the Minister which, I hope, will stand.

This matter was brought to the attention of the new Minister for Health by Tipperary County Council in the months since his appointment to office. The Minister was invited to attend the hospital but the reply the council received, on 20 June 2016, was that the Minister was currently too busy to visit the hospital. However, he has been visiting other hospitals across the country so I cannot understand why some representative at ministerial level would not visit the hospital to see the great job that was done for the amount of money spent, yet the hospital remaining without the beds despite the chronic situation continuing in Clonmel.