Hospital Waiting Lists
Dail Éireann — 2026-07-09
============================================================

Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West

There is often an attempt to suggest that discrimination between private and public patients does not have an impact on safety or patient care. That happened in the debate on the Rotunda. The Minister was involved and was on the correct side of that debate. I again quote the report, which states, "For Spinal patients, only 41% (9 out of 22) were treated within the Clinical Recommended Timeframes (CRTs), meaning 59% faced delays, sometimes for several months." In terms of urology, "Of the 73 patients reviewed, 30 (41%) were treated outside the Clinical Recommended Timeframes." The median delay was 152 days. There was one case where a child waited seven years for routine surgery. The report points out that "children may wait longer than clinically recommended for assessment, investigation or treatment, with potential consequences for clinical outcomes, disease progression, and quality of life." Does the Minister agree that just as private healthcare has no place in our public maternity hospitals, it similarly has no place in CHI? We should not be building private suites in the national children’s hospital. We should not be building inequality into our health system.

---

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/2026-07-09/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:07+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-09