Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I do not know if colleagues were able to listen to Dr. Andrew Westbrook on "Morning Ireland" today. He is the ICU consultant for St. Vincent's University Hospital. He painted a very worrying picture on the current situation in relation to ICU beds. There are currently 119 patients in ICU, which is up 31 from one week ago. Dr. Westbrook also went into some detail on what has not happened in our health service over the past decade and more. He referred to the report produced by the Prospectus Group in 2009. I took the time to have a look at that report this morning. The 2009 report told us that we have a severe deficit of ICU beds. It told us that we needed to get to 579 beds by 2020. Currently we are at 301 beds. We were at 30 beds below that, so it has gone up 30 in the past year, I imagine because of Covid. How many Ministers for health have we had since 2009? What has been the political response to a report that tells us we have not just a deficit, we have a severe deficit of ICU beds? We are at just over half of what we need. I must make the political point that we have parties in this room, Fine Gael being a prime example, that have promised tax cuts over the past decade. As my wife always reminds me, life is about choices. Successive governments have made very poor choices over the past 12 years. The only reason that there has been an increase in ICU beds at all is in response to the Covid crisis. Frankly, how can anyone stand over the record of this Government or the last one, and the ones before that, all of which ignored the fact that we have a severe deficit in critical care beds?

Each successive Minister for Health has ignored that and carried on regardless. We are paying the price for that now. There should be no more talk of tax cuts. There should be no more talk of promising tax cuts when we have a health service that is severely underfunded. Please do not come out with the line "We are spending more than we ever did before." There have been decades of under investment. Yesterday we spoke about University Hospital Limerick, and a claim was made that it is not a resource issue. It absolutely is a resource issue. I know that because the management told me that the hospital is 200 beds short. The promise at the minute is that they should wait another two years before another 96 beds are introduced. There is a fundamental problem here. One either believes in a national health service and proper funding for a national health service or one does not. On this side of the Chamber, my party Sinn Féin believes in a national health service. The evidence is there to show that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael do not.