Hospital Overcrowding
Dail Éireann — 2026-01-22
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Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (FG), Dún Laoghaire

I am very glad to have this timely opportunity to have this discussion with the Deputy. The reason is officials from her region and the three Dublin regions will be in with me on Monday for a whole day to go through some of these issues exactly because we are trying to manage healthcare as a region. There are patients in Cavan who will need to be treated in Beaumont, a specialist centre for neurology, or the Mater, a specialist centre for cardiology. That patient flow is absolutely crucial and so patients are moving out of Beaumont at an appropriate stage so as to enable the specialist care. We have to think of healthcare as a region and that it is just as acceptable for people to move back from Beaumont to Cavan to free up the space for somebody from Cavan to go to Beaumont. Regarding what the Deputy said about the step-down facilities in Monaghan, I would be very glad if she has specific examples that she can give me before Monday because it is precisely those that I will be testing in person with the different regions on Monday in great detail. The better the local examples I have for that the better I can test and push and make sure the efficiency in that flow is there. I would really appreciate the Deputy’s support to me in giving me that local knowledge before Monday.

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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