Seanad report: Contrary to how some people viewed them, hospital trolleys were not a bed of nails, Pat Moylan (FF), Government Whip in the House, said.
He had seen trolleys during visits to hospitals. "The way people speak to me, you'd think they were a bed of nails."
Trolleys, he said, were a top-class facility for people who required them.
Backing calls for a debate on health services, Mr Moylan said he was sure that Minister for Health Mary Harney would welcome an opportunity to explain to the House the great work that she and her department were doing.
People could knock the department and the A&E services, but his experience was that there was more money being spent now on security at A&Es than had been spent on professionals attending to people needing treatment in the past.
Many people who telephoned radio stations had a lot to answer for in respect of the way some of them had carried on in the past, he said.
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Noel Coonan (FG) said that a case had been brought to his attention involving an 8-year-old boy who did not know when he would get an urgently needed replacement wheelchair.
A lack of available funding meant no date for the provision of the replacement could be set.
It was a disgrace that a young person in this age of wealth could not be granted a wheelchair. Was that the new form of socialism people were supposed to be witnessing, asked Mr Coonan.
Publicity about suspect transactions in the reinsurance market, widely reported in the US, was a major risk to Ireland's reputation, Feargal Quinn (Ind) said.
It seemed that the inappropriate behaviour being investigated had been masterminded out of the Irish Financial Services Centre in Dublin and that certain executives banned from the Australian market had continued to work here for months after that ban had been reported to the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority by the Australian regulatory bodies.
It was not appropriate to pursue the details further in the House, but he wished to highlight the risk of our international reputation being compromised.