I will start, if I may, by offering my condolences to the family of Tom Burke, his wife and his children. He was an ever-present character, in the best possible sense, around Leinster House and he will be missed not only by his family but also by people in Leinster House.

This morning, there were 451 people on trolleys in hospital corridors and squeezed into free space. Limerick, Galway and Cork are still the worst hit hospitals, as they have been for years, with no change. Waiting lists are spiralling out of control, with more than 900,000 people on acute lists and 200,000 people more on diagnostic lists. This includes more than 100,000 children. The mind boggles when you reflect on that number of people who are on waiting lists and the length of time they have been waiting. We are back to high trolley counts, with waiting lists out of control, and the Government, it seems, has no plan to deal with them.

There are real human consequences of this crisis. Over the summer, I conducted a survey on the impact of long waiting times on patients. The results were stark. Long waiting times have severe consequences for stress and anxiety, with a major negative impact on people's quality of life. The survey found that 75% of people's conditions have got worse because of their wait. This is particularly severe for those waiting more than a year. It is clear that care delayed is care denied and that long wait times fail patients. There are severe consequences for mental health, with more than 70% of respondents reporting that their mental health has been severely or considerably affected.

We need to see a waiting list plan from the Government. It cannot be more window dressing, committees or talk. It has to be about action, capacity and resources. The Tánaiste knows we need more beds, staff and capacity in diagnostic and surgical theatre space. I know this from my experience in Waterford and I am sure he knows it from his experience as a previous Minister for Health. We also need modern IT systems.

One area severely affected by capacity has been maternity services. We need to see real investment in maternity services to ensure women in this country have the highest quality of care. The Tánaiste may have noticed the protest yesterday outside Leinster House, where pregnant women and their families, some with young babies, had no choice but to travel to Dublin for a protest to end maternity restrictions. Partners have been locked out of appointments and labour because of a lack of space and outdated buildings and, of course, because of infection control measures as well. Yesterday many Government backbenchers stood in solidarity with and gave commitments to the women affected and expectant mothers. I commend Linda Kelly and the #BetterMaternityCare campaign, who organised the protest, and the others who spoke or travelled. We have all heard the tragic and horrific stories from women abandoned in the most heartbreaking circumstances. These maternity restrictions need to be lifted now and the Tánaiste and his Government need to act on this. All parties and none that stood in solidarity now have to make sure there is action.

What is the Government's plan to tackle waiting lists? What is its plan to inject capacity into our healthcare system? I heard in Cork on Monday, when I met the CEO of Cork University Hospital, that we are facing into an horrendous winter in acute hospitals of more overcrowding, more people on trolleys and waiting times getting longer. What is the Government's plan to ensure that this does not happen? What specific injections of capacity and resources will be put into our healthcare system? Also, what will the Government do to end maternity restrictions?

There were a lot of questions there, all very valid, and I will do my best to answer them as best I can in the time allowed.

First, however, I join the Leas-Cheann Comhairle in paying my respects to Tom Burke, who was a truly fine man. He was one of the first people I met and got to know when I became a Member of this House. He was a feature of Irish politics and photojournalism, and I was really sorry to hear yesterday that he had passed away. I extend to his family and friends the Government's condolences and those of my party.

I acknowledge the enormous distress and discomfort that overcrowded emergency hospitals cause patients and their families and also front-line staff working in very challenging conditions in hospitals throughout the country. I acknowledge also the risks involved in respect of infection control and delayed care.

The HSE reports that there were 292 patients on trolleys in our hospitals this morning. That is up from 164 this day last year, when hospitals were largely closed due to the pandemic, but substantially down on previous years, such as 2019, when the number was 451 a day around this time of year. A total of 292 is still 292 too many, however, and it is not acceptable that people should spend prolonged periods of time on hospital trolleys awaiting admission.

What is our plan to deal with this issue? It involves increasing our bed capacity, increasing staffing levels, modernising care pathways and expanding care in the community. Since the Government was formed, and since the pandemic started, we have added more than 800 beds to our acute hospital system. That is why the number of people on trolleys, while still too high, is substantially lower than it was in 2019, before we added those additional beds to the system. We need to add more and we have detailed plans to do exactly that, as spelt out in the national development plan earlier this week. We have also increased the number of staff considerably. The HSE has recruited between 7,000 and 8,000 additional staff so far this year and has authority to recruit more. That authority will carry over to next year, but we all understand the difficulties that exist, both in Ireland and around the world, in recruiting healthcare staff. The addition of 7,000 or 8,000 staff this year alone is a significant increase and it is making a difference.

We are also expanding care in the community, which is enabling more people to receive healthcare in their communities and ensuring they do not have to go to hospital in the first place. That is largely being done through building up our GP services, particularly by giving GPs greater access to diagnostics. We have also put huge resources into home care. The waiting times for home care are substantially down on what they were before, which means more patients can get out of hospital more quickly. That frees up beds, and the same thing goes for the adequate funding of the fair deal scheme. Those are the main things we are doing at the moment. Of course this is all done against the backdrop of a rising and ageing population and huge pent-up demand for healthcare as a consequence of care deferred during the pandemic. It is a difficult situation but the Government is very much acting on it.

Regarding waiting lists, as the Deputy knows, a task force is being established in the Department of Health to get waiting lists down. The reason they are high at the moment - they were high before the pandemic and they are even higher now - is the need to deliver the care that was deferred as a consequence of hospitals being closed or partially closed for the duration of the pandemic. That has built up a huge unmet need. The way it is going to be managed is similar to the operation of the vaccine task force, which was very successful in producing our vaccine programme. We want to take the same approach now to reducing waiting lists.

Of course the Tánaiste is right to accept that there is enormous distress caused by high wait times. He talked about the risks involved for patients and, yes, there are risks for staff as well, as we know. As a former Minister for Health, he knows that healthcare is, in essence, about people treating people, as well as making sure the people who work in our health services are valued but also that they have the resources.

When the Tánaiste talks about what the Government did last year, he needs to be a bit more straight about what was promised, on the one hand, and what was delivered. There were 1,150 additional acute beds funded and committed to in last year's budget. It was confirmed yesterday by the Secretary General of the Department of Health that some 150 of them will not be delivered. The Tánaiste talked about the 7,500 staff that came into the healthcare system, which I celebrate because they are needed. However, the promise was that there would be 14,500 new staff. The Government has managed to deliver only 7,500 of them. He talked about community services. A total of €150 million was provided last year for enhanced community services. The Tánaiste might not know this but half of that money will not be spent to deliver the community intervention teams that were promised. When people hear about task forces, they will judge the Government on its record, that is, what it committed and promised to do and what it has done.

Thank you, Deputy.

Will the Tánaiste comment in his response on the issue of the restrictions on maternity services?

The budget for the health service this year is €22 billion. It is the biggest health budget we have ever seen in the history of the State. When I was Minister for Health, it was €14 billion. It is 50% higher now than it was then, and more than double what it was when I was practising as a doctor in the public health service. Money is certainly not the issue any more when it comes to our health service. As the Deputy pointed out, some of the money will even go unspent this year. There is no lack of money and no lack of political will, but there are real constraints. The Deputy knows as well as I do that adding an additional bed is not simply buying a piece of furniture; it is a whole system and that takes time to do. Recruiting people is difficult as well. The fact that the HSE has added more than 7,000 additional, mainly clinical, staff this year is an achievement, and one we should recognise. The HSE has the authority now to continue that recruitment and take on more staff.

Yes, we did not add the 1,000 beds we aimed for, but we did add 850 and that is the equivalent of two hospitals. It is quite an achievement in the space of less than two years and we need to continue with that now. Although trolley numbers are still too high today, they are not far off half of what they were two years ago. We need to keep expanding our health service to bring those numbers down further.