Health Services Staff
Dail Éireann — 2026-07-09
============================================================

Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (FG), Dún Laoghaire

I thank Deputy Cullinane. That does sound like a plan of work but I am afraid it is a plan of work for my excellent colleague, the Minister, Deputy Lawless, and the Department of higher education. I do not wish to step across him but I can say in relation to clinical placements and training that I have met the HSE. The Minister, Deputy Lawless, and I have been working on this together, with some frustration that the placements have been too limited to acute settings and they need to be in community settings . We are trying to work on this, although I am still not satisfied it is happening at the scale that is necessary.
I am glad Deputy Cullinane mentioned the hospital. We had a very good week this week with the commencement of 24-7 cardiac care in Waterford and I thank Ben O'Sullivan for all of the work he has done to get ready for it. I know another two consultants are yet to come into post and everyone else did extra work to make sure we met the deadline we set of 6 July. This is very good news. Of course, we will have our surgical hub by the end of the year. As to the medical school, I do not wish to step across my colleague, Deputy Lawless, on that, if Deputy Cullinane will forgive me.

---

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