Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I begin by agreeing with others on the death and the horrific circumstances around the funeral of Shireen Abu Akleh in Palestine, which I also raised last Thursday. The key ask is that we recognise and understand that we should not be treating Israel as a normal state. We should recognise and state what the whole world knows to be true, namely, that Israel is an apartheid state. We need to hear Government Ministers recognise and state that fact. In all honesty, that is the only way to go from this point onwards. We cannot keep pretending that somehow Israel is a normal state. It is anything but and we have seen that with our own eyes in recent days.

It will not surprise the Acting Leader to hear me raise University Hospital Limerick, UHL, again. My colleague, Deputy Quinlivan, through a reply to a parliamentary question, discovered that last year 9,000 patients had to wait more than 12 hours for treatment at the hospital. The exact figure was 8,720. To give the House an idea of where this is going, in 2013 the figure was 4,000-odd, so it has doubled in less than ten years. The really terrifying part of this is that a report by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine in Britain noted that, on average, there is one excess death for every 67 patients who stay in an emergency department for between eight and 12 hours. Based on the figures from last year, we had 130 additional deaths of patients in our hospital in Limerick. That is 130 families grieving over people who should not have died but did because of the ongoing chaos and impossible conditions that staff and patients alike are having to put up with. This has been the case for a decade at this stage and it has got worse, year in, year out and month in, month out. The promise of additional beds is not enough. The figure of 92 new beds equates to just 48 new beds. In reality, we have been waiting at least 18 months for those. I just cannot understand the lack of action by successive Governments. The latest news is that the Minister has declared that a specialist team will be deployed to UHL but we do not have any details of the team's remit and its make-up remains very vague.

At the weekend, I stood with colleagues in Limerick city centre and people were queueing for well over an hour to sign a petition calling for a health emergency to be declared in Limerick. When will the Government listen? I am asking once again for an urgent debate specifically on University Hospital Limerick.