My question is to the Taoiseach and the Minister, Jennifer Carroll MacNeill. Last year, here in the Dáil Chamber and at the Oireachtas health committee, I led calls for an independent review into the access to emergency care in the mid-west region. That review, led by HIQA, has concluded. A whole host of recommendations are before the Government now. One of the key ones is that there is a need for short-term beds to be accelerated and increased, but in the long term people need access to a better hospital system. I make the case in the strongest possible terms for option C, which is before the Government. Option C is to have a new model 3 hospital and it should be based in County Clare. The evidence is there in abundance that of all counties in Ireland, of all regions, ours is the most health-disadvantaged in the country. We are geographically peripheral. For more than half of our population, there is no golden hour; they live well beyond in it. Friends of Ennis Hospital, led by Angela Coll, its chairperson, had made the case repeatedly and vociferously, and I thank the Minister, Deputy Carroll MacNeill, and Stephen Donnelly before her, for listening to them many times over. The case is there in abundance. There are many sites that are accessible to all of the mid-west, they are in County Clare, and I ask that the failures of 2009 be put right once and for all.

I thank the Deputy, and indeed many Deputies who have raised this issue with me. The HIQA report was published by HIQA just this lunchtime. It is a comprehensive report, 1,200 pages, looking back into the demographic issues in the area. It gives three options. The first two are loaded in terms of giving acute beds in the hospital. The third option, C, is the longer term option of a model 3 hospital. HIQA itself prioritises options A and B as meeting the needs of the people in the most immediate term and says that option C, the model 3 hospital, would take a very long time, cost a lot and not meet the needs in the interim period. In the first instance, therefore, I am pleased to say that 96 beds will open this week into next week and we will be there to formally open them in October. We hope that planning permission will come through for the other 96 beds very shortly. Our first priority and, as HIQA analysed, the most important thing is the inpatient acute bed deficit in Limerick hospital. That has to be our first priority.