On Friday, the Taoiseach visited University Hospital Limerick, UHL, and met with staff and some hospital campaigners. I welcome this as I have been calling for such a visit for a long time. I hope the Taoiseach saw the unsanitised version of the problems faced by patients and staff there. That was on Friday. In the past two days there have been 205 people on trolleys. The total number of people on trolleys in the hospital to date this year is 1,140, which is much higher than last year. In all of 2022, we had 18,012 people lingering on trolleys. This was the highest toll ever recorded in any hospital. The declaration of a major internal incident following the crisis at Christmas had an impact, but once that was stood down, the numbers, as expected, shot right back up.

There should be nobody on a trolley. There should be sufficient capacity for all patients. In that context, the construction of the three new units needs to proceed with the utmost speed. This is one critical aspect of the solution. The other is the recruitment and retention of new staff and the retention of the existing medical staff. Can the Taoiseach outline the efforts being made for immediate improvements in the context of treatment of patients at UHL and the longer term plans to alleviate the pressures at our local hospital?

I thank the Deputy. I was very pleased to visit UHL last week. It was the third or fourth time I visited the hospital, and the third time I had visited the accident and emergency department. I was in the old one and in the new one when it opened. I was there again the other day. It really is a very good and modern department. It has some equipment and facilities that just do not exist in other parts of the country, like CT facilities on site, for example, as well as 11 consultants, which is a huge number. It is horribly overcrowded, however. I am sure it is much more overcrowded when I am not visiting. It was overcrowded when I was there, however. The hospital cannot function the way it should function because patients are forced to wait on trolleys for admission. We must do everything we can to change this situation.

Go raibh maith agat, Taoiseach.

When the new CEO of the HSE is appointed, I am going to sit down with him and the Minister for Health, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, and see what we can do.

I thank the Taoiseach.

As the Deputy will know, though, developments are under way. A 96-bed block is under construction on the public hospital site. There is also a new private hospital. We want to make better use of Ennis and Nenagh and do other things as well.