*Friends of Ennis Hospital Chairperson, Angela Coll.
ANY POTENTIAL new hospital in Co Clare must be located in the environs of the Ennis Municipal District, a public meeting on healthcare in the region has heard.
Organised by Clare TD, Donna McGettigan (SF), the public meeting was held at The Temple Gate on Thursday last.
Deputy McGettigan chaired the meeting with Limerick TD, Maurice Quinlivan (SF), Ireland South MEP, Kathleen Funchion (SF), Cllr Tommy Guilfoyle (SF) and Cllr James Ryan (SF) among the politicians in attendance along with Hilary Tonge (SF).
Addresses were also given by Melanie Cleary of Mid-West Hospital Campaign and Friends of Ennis Hospital Chairperson, Angela Coll.
Voices need to be united to improve healthcare in the region, Deputy McGettigan stated. “I opened the meeting with a minute silence for all those who lost their lives due to the ongoing crisis. The Mid-West has lower total per capital bed capacity compared with the rest of Ireland. A higher proportion of admitted patients in UHL are accommodated on Trolleys relative to the other model four hospitals. We have no dedicated public inpatient beds for adults with anorexia.
Mental health services in Clare is seriously impacted with the Mid-West having no clinical nurse specialists for suicide crisis assessment. Our ambulance service in Clare is under resourced, this has been raised for over a decade now. We have people in Clare living over 100km to their nearest A+E. Over a three year period over 12,000 people from Clare attended Galway A+E rather than attend Limerick.
We have people telling us that they fear attending Limerick UHL.
“What we learned from this meeting is that our voices need to be one. We need to have all of the three HIQA recommendations implemented immediately. Accountability is also something that is called for”.
Angela Coll told the meeting she chairs Ireland’s longest running health campaign and that she has been actively involved in campaigns for better health services in Clare since the 1980s. “I marched with 1000’s of people in opposition to the downgrading of Ennis in 2009 and was one of a much smaller group present at Ennis hospital on the night the ED finally closed in 2013. I have met with all of the health ministers in Ireland since 2009 with the exception of Dr. James Reilly who declined to meet with me before the ED in Ennis closed as he said the closure was on ‘medical advice’. Having read both the Hanly report from 2003 and the Horwath Teamwork report from 2008 I can state with absolute certainty that the so-called medical advice at the time was flawed, but that was then and this is now”.
She stated, “Progress has never come from silence. Every major advance in healthcare has come because ordinary people refused to accept suffering as normal, because health care is more important than politics, it’s more important than personal ambitions, it is literally a matter of life or death”.
Coll outlined, “We must fight for a better health service for all of us, not just ourselves and our parents and elderly but for our children and grandchildren. We have in 2026 a golden opportunity to lay down a marker for better health services for our county. It is our belief in Friends of Ennis hospital that the Option B provided for in the HIQA report should be located as far north of Coonagh as is possible and we have been in contact with the HSE to express that view vocally and frequently. Option B is the medium-term solution to the overcrowding in UHL. Option C is the long-term solution. With Regard to Option C it is our belief that this needs to be located within the environs of Ennis Municipal District. That is not up for debate. The presentation levels at the Local Injuries unit in Ennis show that the demand for services in Ennis far outweighs the demand in north Tipperary. We have the population here in Clare to sustain an acute hospital and our geographical spread within the county means that it is absolutely vital that a site for Option C is identified and purchased by the HSE this year preferably in Q1 of 2026 because while land in Clare is available right now we have no idea what kind of demand there will be for land in the county over the next 10 years”.
She said, “there is a public perception that we can just ‘reopen the ED’ in Ennis and all will be well. I need to make this clear this is not factually correct and that narrative does not help anyone. For a start with Ennis hospital working above 100% occupancy already if we had an ED on the current site there are no beds for admitted patients so we would just be moving the trolley issue from Limerick into Ennis. Secondly, and most importantly it would not be safe to just unlock the doors and reopen the ED in Ennis because the backup services are just not there anymore. We would need 24/7 lab and radiology which we don’t have. We would need an MRI and a CAT scan and far more X-ray machines than are onsite. We would need high dependency beds, ICU beds and cardiac Beds all of which need to be single occupancy not in nightingale wards which Ennis simply does not have. That’s not to mention medical teams on site 24/7 including Surgeons, theatre nurses triage nurses. Our best bet for a safe effective health service for Clare is in a new build on a greenfield site”.
