The Government needs to end the recruitment freeze in the health services in Donegal. For years, we have struggled with a lack of staff in our hospital at Letterkenny, our mental health services, our disability services and our community hospitals. We have lagged behind the rest of the country. We won a campaign last year on the surgical hub. It was based on the fact that we had been neglected for years. Just as we are starting to turn that around, this recruitment freeze has kicked in. It has to be removed. We cannot continue to allow our people to suffer in the emergency department in Letterkenny, our staff to work in horrendous conditions and our people with disabilities and those using mental health services to be failed. Will the Government remove the recruitment freeze immediately?

Staffing levels have increased very significantly across the entirety of the health service in the past number of years. Budgets have gone up very significantly. There needs to be a degree of realism about this and how we plan sustainably for the provision of our health services. There has been expansion across the board. The surgical hub was a good decision that the Minister took. The Minister listened to Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Labour and Independent TDs. There was no campaign. The Minister was readily persuadable in respect of Letterkenny, and indeed other hospitals, because a surgical hub is a good model to try to ring-fence elective beds so that people can get their surgery done more quickly.

I will ask the Minister to engage with Letterkenny with a view to seeing what can be done. The staffing has increased all round this year again very substantially.