I am sorry. I have this question as "not submitted".

I do not have a Priority Question from the Deputy. I will try to get an answer for her, but we have this question as "not submitted".

I will do my best to answer.

My apologies for the mix-up, whatever the source. I will get the Deputy a full and more official answer. Nevertheless, I will speak from my own experience. The focus on delayed transfers of care is an integral part of the focus on trolleys - the whole thing goes together. What we are really talking about is patient flow. Hospitals that experience ongoing delayed transfer of care, DTOC, problems include Letterkenny University Hospital, for example, where the number was in the 40s, but is now down in the 30s and movi…

The Deputy is 100% right. It does not necessarily lie with the hospital management. For example, in Cork, with the IHA managers, there is no governance element to this. They are not CUH beds or Mercy Hospital beds, and nobody had better tell me that they think they are. They are beds for the south west, and they have to be managed from a single centre, which happens to be in CUH at the moment, but we will see about that. They have to have visibility over what is the situation in Blarney, Bantry, Mallow, South Infir…

I understand. For example, I visited a facility very like that. Please forgive me; I do not have the name in front of me but it is in the north of Dublin, an acquired brain injury-----

That is exactly it. Forgive me. It is looking to build the facility adjacent to the primary care centre.

Exactly. What we can do is work with an approved housing body, AHB, to build that residential. The HSE is for delivery of healthcare and we try to make it work as well as we can but here are the things we are not: we are not a transport company and we do not build homes. What we can do is partner with AHBs to make sure we are developing long-term residential that is adjacent and appropriate for needs of that kind. On that site in particular, what we are looking at is what capacity we can have for people who need to…

I would rather it did not.

I thank the Deputy, and I join him in thanking the Secretary General, Mr. Robert Watt, and the previous CEO of the HSE, Mr. Bernard Gloster, who both did outstanding work in the Department of Health and the HSE in different ways. They have really stabilised and improved the service more broadly since 2022 in particular and I thank them for that. I also wish both the new Secretary General, Mr. Derek Tierney, and the new CEO, Ms Anne O'Connor, well in their new roles, which are very significant roles for everybody. N…

I know.

I agree and I thank the Deputy for his support on these reform programmes. He is right about the elective hospitals but before then, we have the opportunity with the surgical hubs, which will be delivered in 2026. The delivery of the surgical hubs is going to create all sorts of different waves. We are looking at what procedures need to go there immediately and what that will free up in the hospitals where they would otherwise have been done. How is that going to be staffed and when? I am looking at the National Tr…

I totally agree with the Deputy and I think we will get there with Galway and Cork much more quickly. I would like to discuss with all Deputies options around Dublin because clearly we have the option in relation to Connolly hospital. The Deputy may have noticed that we put in some high-dependency unit, HDU, beds in advance because that is really going to be an important enabler. We did that in the past number of weeks. We put the staff in to have significantly expanded HDU capacity in Connolly hospital with a view…

I thank the Deputy for his ongoing engagement on this. As he knows as well as I do, this makes a huge difference to families around the country. Much progress has been made now. The Health (Assisted Human Reproduction) Act 2024 was signed into law by the President in July 2024. I have a difficulty with a definitive timeline as to the complete commencement of the AHR legislation as there are a number of interdependencies and considerations involved, not least the timing that I do not control over a Supreme Court cas…

The Deputy is a practical person, as am I. If a court case is before the Supreme Court, then there is a court case before the Supreme Court and there is nothing I can do about that. I would be in breach of my own responsibility not to cross over in the separation of powers were I to do anything other that wait for the outcome of that. I do not have any discretion in relation to that. As for people threatening to take legal cases, people are entirely entitled to take legal cases if they wish to do so. That is the es…

I agree with the Deputy. Indeed, this is something I have been involved with in different ways since working in the Department of children and since advancing the Children and Family Relationships Act, as I did when I worked in the Department of justice in 2013. I have been working on this for a really long time and I share the Deputy's frustration. I want to see people having access to families where they can. We need to speak about rights in totality, however. Yes, there is a right to family, a right to procreate…

The Dublin North and East region, which includes Cavan and Monaghan, has benefited from recent investment, with 12 additional paramedics in 2025 and a further 12 scheduled for this year. Six additional emergency medical technicians are planned for Cavan. This will help to preserve front-line ambulances for emergency calls. I highlight this because the National Ambulance Service is focused on addressing areas where there is a clear need for greater resourcing. A particular emphasis is on targeting potential applican…

It is difficult to answer in light of some of the circumstances involved. The Deputy raised an individual case where somebody identified a specific reason. While I acknowledge that, in other cases it is not clear whether a patient, for example - it is awful to speak about it in this way - was going to die irrespective. I can understand the clinical constraints in providing broad data when dealing with many individual circumstances. It is because of the increased response times and the availability that we are tryin…

I appreciate that the Deputy may find it difficult to see that we cannot fill posts but I assure her that it is true. Of last year's posts, there were 180, and 134 have been filled. I would like it to be 180 filled. This year we have provision for 263, which is obviously a considerable increase on last year, so the direction of travel in terms of our investment is very clear. This is not unique to the ambulance services; we have this difficulty across home support, we have it across recruiting into the medical prof…

I am sorry, that is not-----