Rose Conway Walsh (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Today there are 631 people on trolleys, which is the highest figure of the year. The Government has responded by reintroducing a moratorium on recruitment. It is absolutely crazy. Fianna Fáil did that. That is why we are in the situation we are in. All of those trolleys are lined up because we do not have enough front-line staff. We just do not have enough staff to physically open the beds. We do not have enough staff in accident and emergency units to do the treatments. In some hospitals, three or four nurses are trying to cover the work of seven nurses. Seven ambulances were lined up at Mayo University Hospital last week because not enough front-line staff were available to do the handover, treat the patients, get them into fully staffed beds and look after them in the way that any republic should do.

Instead of doing that, we are putting a moratorium on staff. In this case, it is not about extra funding - it is about the decision to hire managerial and administrative staff rather than front-line staff. One of the Senators here gave us the figures last year. We learned that 2,603 administrative staff and managerial staff, but just 54 extra nurses, had been employed by the HSE since 2014. It is a crazy situation. We have enough HSE communications, managerial and administrative personnel. We need front-line staff. That is what is going to reduce our trolley numbers and stop the ambulances lining up outside our hospitals. It is a crazy situation. We need another debate in here with the Minister for Health, particularly on the trolley numbers.

I want to raise what has been happening with ATMs, which is not confined to the-----