Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State is very welcome. As we know, this Bill needs to be passed every year to allow the Department to spend the allocated moneys. It is a bit of housekeeping that has to be done. Of course, Sinn Féin will support the passing of the Bill. This debate gives me an opportunity to raise some local issues regarding capital spending or more frankly, the lack of capital spending.

I will deal briefly with three topics, the first of which is housing. The Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, said last year that the Government is spending half of what it actually needs to spend on housing. I will localise the issue for the Minister of State. I live in Castleconnell, which is a beautiful village of 2,500 people. Right now, we have 443 families and individuals looking for a house in Castleconnell, and it is planned to build five public houses. The official plan for the village tells us we need 130, which is probably an underestimate. Five houses is the reality. I say this to highlight how badly people on my side of Limerick have been let down in terms of adequate capital spend. It is easy to talk about this in terms of figures but when I talk about housing in Castleconnell, I think about a young mother with two young children aged three and five who is living in a single room in her parents' house. She has absolutely no prospect of getting a house and is in absolute despair. I know of another young mother whose child is ready to go to school in Castleconnell. Her whole family support network is in Castleconnell but she is living on the other side of the city with no prospect of getting a house. There are no plans right now to build the additional houses we need. I want to highlight that. I could have picked any number of examples but this is the one I know best. It highlights very clearly the level of despair, frankly, in terms of the housing emergency we face. I call on the Government, as I have consistently done, to address this issue in a much more fundamental and ambitious way.

The Minister of State will be very familiar with my second issue regarding transport, which I have raised with him previously. The Government effectively cancelled the plans for the northern distributor road in Limerick even though it is essential infrastructure. The Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, has made it absolutely clear that it has been cancelled. It has been dropped from all of the plans. This road network is essential if we are to open up investment on the north side of our city. It is also essential for people travelling across the city, who face traffic chaos and danger around the Mackey roundabout, in particular. This road has been in train for several years and the Government has cancelled it. In fairness, all politicians across all parties locally condemned the move, with the exception of the Green Party, I hasten to add. They condemned the fact that this plan has been dropped. I cannot begin to tell the Minister of State the impact it is having in terms of the huge level of despair.

Effectively, Limerick has been put on hold in terms of transport issues. I see that my colleague, Senator Buttimer, is in the Chamber. We really cannot see where the Cork-Limerick motorway is at this point. We would like to know whether it is going ahead. I am not convinced that it is. The Minister of State might shed some light on what is happening on that particular capital project. Again, it is essential. When I was at university, which was a long time ago now, we spoke about a western corridor linking Cork, Limerick and Galway and discussed having really good motorway and rail networks across those three cities. Thankfully, Galway and Limerick are well connected now but we desperately need a motorway connection between Limerick and Cork. I cannot see where the plans are.

I call on the Minister of State to talk to his senior Minister and ask him to revisit the northern distributor road, in particular. It is causing fury. Of course, it is particularly impacting some of the most vulnerable working-class communities on the north side of the city. They have been badly let down for generations now. We need to get that northern distributor road built. The whole city needs it so that we can have a much more effective transport network, which would obviously utilise the public transport we all want to see. The Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, does not seem to recognise that right now, public transport across Limerick is just not adequate. We do not have enough buses. We do not have the rail network developed. Yes, there are plans and there is much talk about it, which we welcome, but we are years away from it actually happening. I want to highlight that issue.

My third point is on the issue of health. When I met the management of University Hospital Limerick, UHL, earlier this year, in fairness its representatives conceded that the hospital is 200 beds short. This has been an ongoing issue for as long as Fine Gael has been in government, for the seven years Fianna Fáil has been effectively supporting the Government and, indeed, for the two and a half years the Green Party has been in government. Right now, there are plans for 96 bed units, but 48 of those beds will be replacing old beds that are coming out of the system. That will not be ready this winter. It probably will not be ready next winter. When it is completed, we will still be 150 beds short. What does that mean? It means we have 1,500 people on average every month on trolleys in our hospital. The latest HIQA report shows devastating results in terms of the fact that our hospital is not safe for patients.It is easy to talk about the figures, but we should talk to the families about the despair they experience about having to wait, in some cases, for days on a trolley. Elderly patients in their 70s or 80s are spending days on trolleys as a result of inadequate planned capital expenditure over a long period of time. The impact has been that people across Limerick are frankly afraid to go to their local hospital. The HIQA report, which I think only came out yesterday, is probably the most damning report yet in relation to the ongoing failures of this Government. We need to see much more urgency in capital investments in our hospitals. We need to see a real belief in achieving the goals that were set out in Sláintecare all those years ago. We are still so far away from that.

Those are the capital issues that I wanted to raise briefly in the time I have. We will of course be supporting this Bill because it is a necessary piece of housekeeping, but I could not let the opportunity pass to highlight the desperate and urgent need for additional investment, at pace, in housing, health and transport across Limerick.