Hospital Overcrowding Dail Éireann — 2026-05-12 ============================================================ Maurice Quinlivan (SF), Limerick City I am deeply concerned by a part of the Minister of State’s response. He said that, “Under existing plans, we will deliver 420 additional beds by 2031”. He also said that 128 of those beds have already been delivered at UHL but HIQA said in September, when it knew these beds were there, that 500 beds were needed. That is what it said. I spoke to senior officials in the hospital before I came here tonight. I am deeply concerned about that. I am deeply concerned that the mid-west has been left behind for years. We do not just need a small plan to go forward but an intervention. We must realise the mistakes we made in the past. People have been abandoned for years. As I said, Waterford has more consultants than UHL, but we have double the number of people presenting. The staff have been left in an impossible situation where presentations in January and February of this year have increased by 14%. The Government is not planning an extra 14% in its plans. It is actually talking about 300 beds when HIQA says 500 beds are needed. That is a concern. People deserve to be treated properly. When people come to a hospital, they need to be seen, including those presenting at UHL. The people I talk about on trolleys are people who are deemed to be in need of a bed, but no bed is available for them. At UHL, since 2022, we have had 93,000 people on trolleys. I have been at the hospital recently. I am sure the Minister of State has been there as well with relatives and friends. As Professor Joe Devlin said, there are trolleys everywhere. They are all over the place. People are being treated in corridors. Unfortunately, I overheard people’s diagnoses and people in stress. I heard people talking to doctors and nurses, who are doing their very best in an overcrowded situation. The answer is very disappointing. The Minister needs to get involved as a matter of urgency to appoint and get that board up and running. It is 224 days since the HIQA report was published. We need to get that board up and running. We need all three recommendations implemented. We must end the scandal of people in Limerick and the mid-west on trolleys. --- 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/2026-05-12/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:49+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-12