Hospital Facilities
Dail Éireann — 2026-07-09
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Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (FG), Dún Laoghaire

I thank the Deputy. The programme for Government, as the Deputy said, sets out a commitment to increase bed capacity by between 4,000 and 4,500 new and refurbished inpatient hospital beds across the country. This will be achieved through a regionally balanced capacity expansion plan. The substantially enhanced national development plan, NDP, provision for the health sector of €9.25 billion will support the delivery of those beds.
To give the Deputy a much more specific update, 292 new acute inpatient beds have now opened across the country since the programme for Government was agreed, between January 2025 and June 2026, including 128 beds in University Hospital Limerick, 18 beds in Cork University Hospital, 15 beds in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda, 20 beds in Beaumont Hospital and 24 beds in Mallow General Hospital. The HSE anticipates opening 108 more new beds over the course of quarter 3 and quarter 4 of 2026 and quarter 1 of 2027.
Some 259 inpatient beds are currently under construction, including 97 beds at Wexford General Hospital, 42 beds at Sligo University Hospital and 30 beds in University Hospital Kerry. It is intended to open those beds as soon as possible once constructed. In fact, as the Deputy is aware, we are recruiting ahead of the beds being delivered to make sure the staff are there. A further 185 beds are at tender stage and another 152 beds are now at the detailed design stage. We are now seeing this bed-by-bed, significant pipeline of projects progressing through earlier stages of planning, design and approvals. Rather than giving the Deputy broad figures, I thought I would be very specific as to the progress being achieved.

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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