Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

There are 78 people on trolleys at UHL this morning. So the number is running at more than twice the level of the next nearest hospital and three or four times the level of most other hospitals. The Minister will know that 12 years ago Enda Kenny declared, "I'll end the [scourge] of patients on hospital trolleys". That promise was posted all across the country. It was a key electoral promise that went a long way to securing two seats for Fine Gael in Limerick City.

In 2011 - Fine Gael's first year in power - there were 3,500 patients on hospital trolleys in UHL. Last year - 11 years later - 18,000 patients were on trolleys in UHL. So during Fine Gael's 11 years in government the number of patients on hospital trolleys had multiplied by five times. That is its record. You would think that there would be some acknowledgement of these facts somewhere in this Fine Gael motion, especially as 11,000 people came out on to the streets of Limerick a week ago but no. In a truly surreal move, the motion barely references the crisis. There are 946 words in this motion and you have to read down as far as the 774th word before there is a reference to "the serious difficulties experienced over the last couple of months."

Crucially, the motion in no way explains how we got to this point of crisis. Thankfully, 87 doctors who work in UHL were kind enough to publish a letter reminding us of how we got here and it states:

The origins of this ongoing crisis date back to the poorly resourced reconfiguration of hospital services in the midwest in 2009. The 640 beds to support this were never delivered.

That is a fact that needs to be said and acknowledged by both Fine Gael and its sister party, Fianna Fáil, that implemented the disastrous reconfiguration. The result of that reconfiguration cannot just be seen in the HIQA and Deloitte reports but as Mr. Ger Kennedy, who is a SIPTU representative who represents those workers in hospital told me today, it can be seen across the graveyards in the counties of Limerick, Clare and Tipperary because we know from medical research that was carried out in the UK that of the patients who spend more than eight hours in an emergency department on a trolley, one in 67 of them will die.