Hospital Facilities
Dail Éireann — 2025-12-10
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Alan Kelly (LAB), Tipperary North

I thank the Minister of State for her response and I acknowledge the improvements that have happened in UHL in the past couple of years. However, we have serious issues when it comes to staffing and high-level consultants as regards attracting them, given the situation the hospital is in.
Politics has failed the people of the mid-west on this issue. I am not going to start blaming certain parties but politics has failed across this House. Consultants helped drive the agenda to close the units in Ennis, St. John's and Nenagh. Then, they disappeared off the face of the earth and were never found again. Politics now has to come back and fix it. This Chamber has to fix it; the Minister of State's Department has to fix it. We cannot fail the people of the mid-west continuously as we head into Christmas again, with people who live alongside me afraid. We cannot fail the families of these four poor women and others. I could give the Minister of State hundreds of examples of issues there.
The Minister of State spoke about the volume of beds required, which I absolutely accept but how in the name of God can we create those beds without creating a new hospital? I am not even arguing for Nenagh, Ennis or wherever; I just want a decision that we need a new hospital in the mid-west - an access point with beds and critical infrastructure. We cannot go on the way we are. We need that ambition and I am afraid this is being choreographed, that the decision being made next week will be options A and B but not C. I have no issue with option B as long as that decision to create another 100 beds has a hospital wrapped around it in years to come.
The Minister for public expenditure is from the Minister of State's party. I urge the Ministers for Health and public expenditure, Deputies Carroll MacNeill and Chambers, in the next week before the Cabinet decision is made - it has to be made because the Minister has promised it - that this decision will be long term and that we will create a new model 3 or 4 hospital in the mid-west to end the discrimination and fear. There are people who will not go into UHL because of the fear they have and the situation we have been left in.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-12-10/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:27+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-10