Hospital Overcrowding
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-22
============================================================

Cathy Bennett (SF), Cavan-Monaghan

I thank the Minister. I want to point out that families are waiting. I have dealt with a few patients in my constituency in the past month who were waiting to be transferred to Beaumont and the Mater hospitals in Dublin. It took up to four weeks before they were transferred so they are taking up beds in Cavan Hospital when they could be transferred on. I am wondering about the new HSE system, or app, that is in situ . Is it operating so other hospitals know when patients can be transferred and if bed management in other hospitals is actually happening and that hospitals are communicating with each other to ensure that patients are being moved out? A lot of the time people are taking up beds in hospitals where, in my constituency for instance, Cavan Hospital could not offer them the services they required and they need to be moved out. It is also happening in relation to step-down units. We have a perfectly good step-down unit in Monaghan Hospital. I have brought this issue to the Minister previously in relation to Cavan and Monaghan. More patients could be transferred to Monaghan Hospital to the step-down unit there to free up beds.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-01-22/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:32+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-01-22