Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I join with others in sending my commiserations and condolences to the family of the late Senator Dermot Fitzpatrick and to our colleague, Senator Mary Fitzpatrick. It is sad news.

Along with others, I regularly raise University Hospital Limerick. The figures continue to be frightening, with 100 patients on trolleys yesterday. We are looking at our worst ever March. The worst March ever was last year with 1,059 patients on trolleys but so far in March, with another week to go, it is already at 1,245. These are real people lying on trolleys for 24 hours at a time, sometimes in the worst of circumstances. The pressure on the staff and patients is horrific. We urgently need a specific debate on University Hospital Limerick because this has been going on for years and each year it gets worse, not better. We need to see radical change at the top in University Hospital Limerick. I ask for an urgent debate on that matter.

I was genuinely shocked yesterday. I raised a Commencement matter on the awful war that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have been waging on Yemen for the last seven years. Some 400,000 Yemenis have been murdered in the course of this war. I raised it with the Minister of State who came in for the Commencement and I was shocked because in his response there was not one word of condemnation of Saudi Arabia. I then went back to look at other responses in recent years and I discovered that on no occasion has a Minister for Foreign Affairs, including the current Minister, been willing to say one word in condemnation of Saudi Arabia. I remind the Acting Chairperson that this is a regime that beheads gay people and tortures people as a matter of course. It brutalises women and in the words of Hillary Clinton it provides "clandestine, financial and logistic support" to terrorists. This is a regime that chopped a journalist into pieces in a foreign embassy and incinerated Yemeni children travelling on a school bus on their way back from a picnic. The war in Yemen dwarfs the horrors that we are watching happen to the poor people in Ukraine; that is how bad it is. A minimum of 10,000 children have been murdered and yet this Government does not have one word to say about it. It is worse than that because two weeks ago the Government sent a Fianna Fáil Minister out there to tout for more business. He was out there touting for business a few days before Saudi Arabia executed 81 people in one day. I ask the Acting Leader to tell me where this Government’s stance on human rights in Yemen is. As she has the opportunity to do so, will the Acting Leader clearly condemn the Saudi dictatorship for the ongoing horrors and murders inflicted on the Yemeni people?