On this first day back, I will raise the issues of housing and health, as I have on each occasion we have come back. I raise the issue of housing because the housing crisis continues to worsen. The figures and the record of the Government are particularly stark. When it took office, there was 231 homeless adults and 62 homeless children in Limerick, including 41 families. Four years later, the Government has now doubled the number of homeless adults in Limerick to 442. It has tripled the number of homeless children to 191 and almost tripled the number of homeless families to 110. Those are the cold facts. We see it every day in our clinics as the housing crisis gets worse and worse and children are left to fester in hotels and hostels.

These are the results of deliberate decisions by this Government, specifically the disastrous decision to lift the ban on evictions. However, it gets worse because over the course of this Government, the cost of renting in Limerick has gone up by over €10,000. That is the reality and again, that was a political choice. The Government could have frozen rents; it chose not to. Now people are being put to the pins of their collars trying to save each month just to make those rents so they can make extortionate profits, particularly for corporate vulture landlords who pay no tax whatsoever in this country. It is a record of absolute failure, and I am asking for an urgent debate on that issue.

The second issue - the Leader will not be surprised that I raise it again - is the horrendous circumstance of University Hospital Limerick, UHL, which has been all over the news for last number of days. Again, the record is stark. The record number of people on trolleys last year, which was 21,409, is going to be exceeded this year. We already have more than 17,000 human beings on trolleys. That does not include weekends. We have a Minister who actually denies those figures and who has been in this Chamber to deny those figures. He is in denial about the extent of the crisis in UHL. I am glad to say there will be a debate in the Dáil on this issue later this evening. The reality is that UHL remains in crisis, and we are heading into another winter without a sufficient plan. In each of the last two winters the system effectively collapsed, and we are looking at that again. We only learned on Sunday that the new 96-bed unit, which has been promised for quarter 1 throughout the lifetime of this Government, will are not open in quarter 1 or quarter 2. It will not open until after quarter 2 according to Mr. Bernard Gloster. It will be another winter of discontent. We are 200 bed shorts in UHL. The Government has had four years to address this crisis. It has simply failed to do so, and I am calling for an urgent debate.

Like the previous speaker, I would like to have a debate arranged in this House with the Minister for Health to discuss the ongoing issues at University Hospital Limerick, with particular focus on the deaths of a number of people in recent times. A report was issued recently by the former Chief Justice. It is a harrowing read into the death of Aoife Johnston. It must be harrowing for her family, friends and community. The troubling thing that came out of the report is that there is still the potential for this to happen. There were failures and abject failures across the piece. There are some learnings. There has been some significant investment in the hospital in the last four years since the Minister, Deputy Donnelly, came to the brief.

A debate here might be helpful insofar as we can to try to take the politics out of it because this really is about people who have lost their lives unnecessarily through the failures of others. It is always easy to lay the blame at one Minister when there are 110,000,115,000 or 120,000 people working in the service. Yes, there has to be political accountability too for the continued lack of investment in that hospital and in the region, but it would be remiss of us not to try to find a united way forward to see if we can get to the nub of what actually happened. Are there cultural issues? Are there management issues? Are there interpersonal issues? Are there problems between the various different silos that exist in the hospital? It cannot just be about one individual, one person or one discipline. I hope we can have that debate as soon as possible. We owe it to the memory of Aoife Johnston and the others who have been failed by the system. The difficulty we have is that there has been more than a fair share of failures. There will always be an element of misadventure in medicine, and I think people understand and get that, but when they see a consistent trend then there is a need to look at all aspects and facets of the operation of the hospital. I would appreciate if the Leader could arrange that at the earliest possible opportunity.

I very much support the call for an urgent debate on UHL, not just regarding the past but also what is going to happen this winter. I agree that it is not all at the foot of one person, but one person does have a significant role to play in this.

I am very disappointed given that I put in a request to the Minister for Health, Deputy Donnelly, on 10 September, which was two weeks ago today, to have a briefing for all Oireachtas Members in the mid-west and that, while I received an acknowledgement to the e-mail, as of half an hour ago, no meeting has been organised. I requested that the meeting would happen before the Dáil returned, which was a couple days after that. The acknowledgement came but the meeting did not happen. I want to know from the Minister and from Sandra Broderick, the regional executive officer, what is being done for the next couple of months, when we will see a surge. It is an inevitability because it is winter. We saw what happened over the summer, with the highest numbers of any hospital in the country, yet again breaking records.

I am also very disappointed with the timeline and HIQA report. I spoke about this when it was announced that the Minister was asking HIQA to carry out an examination of the provision of emergency care in the mid-west. I wanted to see a short, sharp review. We all know what the issues are. It took three or four months for the terms of reference to be written and now we are told the report will not be available until next summer, which is after the general election and after the negotiation of the next programme for Government. What is the point of that? It is ridiculous. That needs to be looked at urgently. I have called for it and, subsequent to me calling for it, the members of Clare County Council passed a unanimous motion that the timeline needed to be brought back. If the Minister is coming to the House, I want to know what is happening in UHL and I want to know why it has taken a year to come back with a review on urgent care. The Minister has a responsibility to urgently organise a briefing for the mid-west Oireachtas Members. It is not good enough that he has not done it so far after being asked to do it on 10 September.