The Tánaiste said that the waiting times at Cork University Hospital and University Hospital Limerick are a cause for concern. They are not just a cause for concern, they are completely unacceptable. What is happening is shocking and scandalous. I put it to the Tánaiste that, in his constituency, people over the age of 75 who deserve better and who should be treated with respect and dignity waited, on average, 40 hours for treatment in the month of December. That is a scandal. The Tánaiste referred to beds. Some 1,200 beds were funded in budget 2021. About 200 of those beds have still not been delivered but the Tánaiste seems to think that is it. There was nothing in budget 2022 or in budget 2023. The Tánaiste seems to think the job is done, yet we have hospital management across the State screaming out for more beds and more capacity. The Government has to do more.

It is not just about beds; it is also about what is happening in the community. We do not have enough step-down beds or recovery beds. We do not have enough GPs, and out-of-hours GP services are collapsing. That is all putting huge pressures on our hospitals and on emergency departments. Despite the Tánaiste's talk, the Government simply has not done enough and much more needs to be done.

In my time, we put unprecedented investment into infrastructure in Cork. Regrettably, in the past while, significant proposals did not come forward to the degree that they should have.

Say that to the Minister.

I come from the region and I am well aware of the position. The projects are now coming on stream. The lack of ready-to-go projects in respect of certain hospitals has been a cause of concern for me. That is why we are looking at a faster method in the context of getting projects delivered. We are saying that we will build more facilities and increase the number of beds. We are going to do this and it will be additional to the unprecedented 1,000 beds provided since 2020. We did not experience a similar expansion in the number of hospital beds in any recent decade.

Yet the Government took them out.

Parallel with that, there has been a massive increase in the number of people working within our health service. In that context, there are 17,000 more people working in the health service than was the case at the beginning of 2020. That is a 15% increase and it includes more than 5,000 nurses, nearly 3,000 health and social care professionals and 1,800 doctors and dentists. We need to and will do more to provide additional capacity in the context of both personnel and beds.