I raise UHL. We will start off on a positive note. The Minister opened the 96-bed unit in UHL on 13 October. We waited a year and a half for the HIQA report but we have it now. It states exactly what I and others have been saying here for years about UHL. It came out with an A, B and C plan. My view is we need A, B and to work for C. Option A would involve expanding the capacity at UHL. Option B envisages the ED staying on the existing site, along with the infrastructure for critical and complex surgical procedures. Option C is a new hospital for the future. Again on a positive note, a meeting was held here yesterday, convened by Deputy Cooney. It was well-attended by all parties and none. For the first time I was at a meeting where everyone in the room was on the same wavelength. It was 100%. All parties were there. They said A and B plus C.

I do not want this going back into Departments and being buried under paperwork with somebody getting paid stupid money to come up and not deliver. We have had private hospital built in Limerick in 16 months. It was on budget and on time. Let use that model against the spending on the hospitals delivered by the Department. Let us compare one to the other. That private hospital contractor made profit on that building, so why can we not build our hospitals more cheaply, and we take the profit margin out? Why do we not go to the private sector to deliver it? I want A, B and C. I am going to work with everyone who was in the room. There were other people who could not attend who are also in favour of this. The Minister, Deputy O'Donovan, is here. I hope he backs this as well. We want a new hospital for the mid-west region. The lives of people in Limerick, Tipperary and Clare are at risk unless we deliver this. I have been critical of UHL since the start. I am delighted the previous management are gone. I am delighted with the management there at the moment because they are working with everyone who was at the meeting yesterday. People could not speak highly enough of the management in situ. Bernard Gloster is retiring. He is a massive loss, but replacing him is in the Government's hands and whoever takes his place better be as good as he is because otherwise we are going down the same rabbit hole again.

I thank Deputy O'Donoghue for raising this matter. I must say I find myself in agreement with a lot of what he says, if not almost all of it. Let me tease through it. The Minister, Deputy O'Donovan, was away on Government business yesterday-----

That is right.

-----but he intends to work with everybody on this. What the Deputy said and the tone in which he said it are really important. There are some things that are just more important that party politics and shouting and roaring at each other in here. Healthcare and making sure the people of the mid-west have a proper, fit for purpose health service is our priority, the priority of the Minister for Health and the priority of everybody I know across this House. Let us proceed on that basis. Deputy O'Donoghue and other mid-west TDs have been very vocal advocates for the improvement of services at UHL for a sustained period and there is a need for a comprehensive approach to the provision of services in the short and long term, because people cannot wait forever and a day. They need stuff now and then they need to know where this is going in the time ahead. We are fully committed to improving services in the mid-west region.

I welcome the Deputy's comments about the new 96-bed block at UHL. I hope that is seen as a sign of the Government's commitment. The Deputy was at the opening and I want to acknowledge that. I am glad to say that while nobody wants to see anybody on a trolley, we are beginning to see the benefit of that extra capacity. I too know the new management team the Deputy mentioned to be good people, based on my past postings. I am glad to report the average number of people waiting on trolleys at UHL has halved in the three weeks since the new 96-bed block opened compared with the three weeks prior to that. It is still too high, but it shows the benefit. If you put in extra beds and put in the right management you can begin to see improvements. Importantly, there are now enabling works under way for a second 96-bed block. A further 84 inpatient beds are planned at UHL through the acute hospital inpatient bed capacity expansion plan. These projects include 32 rapid build beds. With the first 96-bed block, when you add that up we will increase bed capacity through this variety of initiatives by 308 beds by 2028, with 572 new beds across the region by 2031.

Let us get back to the HIQA review. We have a roadmap. The HIQA review gave us three options, but the Deputy is kind of right; it did not necessarily gave us three options. Did it give us a menu to work through? The Minister briefed the Government on 30 September. Option A of the review was "Expand Capacity at UHL on the Dooradoyle site". Let us all agree we have started that, we need to do more of that and the quicker the better. On the point about infrastructure delivery and cutting through red tape, we are going to have proposals from the Minister, Deputy Chambers, and his Department very shortly, probably this month, on how we speed up infrastructure delivery. The second option was to "Extend the UHL hospital campus to comprise the existing Dooradoyle site and another site...". The third option talked about the potential to develop a model 3 hospital in the HSE mid-west. Alongside these options, HIQA has also presented an extensive number of additional considerations, including system-wide work - reforms, I suppose - that need to be progressed in parallel. I am clear that all options remain on the table. The Government has not ruled out doing any or all of these. That has not happened. The extensive findings and considerations presented by HIQA are being considered fully by the Minister and her officials and in terms of this not dragging on, the Minister has committed to reporting back to Government on next steps by Christmas.

I thank the Tánaiste. It is unusual we are 100% agreed on both sides of the House that this needs to happen. This is a health emergency and under Covid guidelines we were led to do an awful lot of things under health emergencies. We had John Wall with us yesterday as a patient safety advocate. We have an emergency. Why can we not use emergency powers and legislate that this happen now? We have the commitment of the House that it needs to happen now. The people of the mid-west need this now. The biggest thing here is we have gone almost €1 billion over budget with the children's hospital here in Dublin. That would build the hospital in Limerick and cater for a lot of people. Build a box and put a box on top of that box. We have not even looked at what it is going to cost to maintain the outside of the children's hospital due to all the curvatures and glass. It is about the care within a building. The old two-storey Georgian houses have been here for generations and are beautiful-looking houses. They are boxes. Why can we not just build a box and care for the people who deserve the care, and stop all these expensive designs? It is about the care and the equipment in the building, it is not about the look of a building.

We are fully committed to UHL. We are fully committed to the mid-west. Let us hope this term of this Dáil signals a new dawn in terms of moving forward on the HIQA report.

The last Dáil was about commissioning HIQA reports but that is all done now. I agree with the Deputy. We do not need a whole load of palaver around next steps. We need the Minister to do her job, which she is doing extremely well, and to report back to Government by Christmas. That is her intention and she is fully supported by everyone in the Government and, I think, by everyone in the Opposition in making that progress. We have increased the budget of UHL very significantly, from €265 million in 2019 to €507 million last year. We have increased the number of staff and are putting in the bed capacity.

I do not want to overly agree with the Deputy in case I kill his street cred but his overall point about infrastructure delivery is right. Things are taking far too long. There are simple things we can do and intend to do. There will be proposals from Government on this by the end of the month. One is to move processes in parallel. We do not need to wait for full planning permission to prepare procurement. Processes need to move in parallel. You can save a significant amount of time. We will also need to see emergency legislation in this House on the delivery of critical infrastructure. If the Government and the Opposition really want to get things moving, we should work together on that in the time ahead.