Nicole Ryan (Sinn Fein)

I will share time with Senator Collins. I welcome the Minister and thank her for being here. What is happening in the mid-west is not a stand-alone issue. It is a symptom of a health system that is stretched to its limits and a government that has failed to match population growth with the necessary investment in critical infrastructure. For years now, the mid-west has had one of the most overcrowded emergency departments in the entire country. UHL has broken trolley records time and again. Staff are exhausted, patients are frightened and families are left in corridors for days. Communities across the mid-west have been raising the same alarm again and again. No other region in Ireland is operating under that kind of pressure. No other region has been expected to absorb the closure of multiple emergency departments without a corresponding investment in beds, staffing, diagnostics and community services. The result is predictable. We see overcrowding, dangerously long waiting lists and a level of strain that undermines the safety of patients every single day.

Of course, this not about blaming front-line workers. They are performing miracles in impossible conditions. The issue is political will and planning. It is about the refusal of successive governments to accept what every clinician and every community in the mid-west has been saying, which is that the system just cannot cope. We need a fundamental shift. We need capacity and more beds, staff and diagnostics. We need real investment in step-down and community care. We need resilience and a system that is flexible enough to ensure that one overcrowded emergency department does not bring the entire region to its knees. Ultimately and inevitably, the region needs another hospital. I know that is option C but it is needed, especially in light of current population growth. This is essentially about fairness and equality in services for people. A person's chance to get timely life-saving care should not depend on their postcode but, time and time again, we see that it does. The people in the mid-west deserve a health system that works and a Government that sees this not just as a regional problem, but as a national responsibility.