‘The Galway emergency department was packed as tightly as sardines in a tin’

people that are turning up at our hospital doors. However, as I wrote that piece little did I think that I was about to experience firsthand the chaos that is currently taking place in every emergency department across the country.

A couple of weeks ago I told readers how the decisions to close the A&E departments in Ennis, Nenagh and Roscommon hospitals (among others) had come back to haunt us, with the inevitable result that our health service is completely unable to deal with the numbers of sick

It was on Tuesday morning of last week, at a time when the whole place was in the grip of hard frost and freezing fog, that I set off to the old Regional Hospital in Galway, bringing with me a family member who had woken up in excruciating pain. We hit the slippy road shortly after 7.30 am and arrived safely at the hospital at around 9.15 am. As always, parking was a nightmare. After depositing my patient at the ED, I spent the guts of half an hour looking for a space to park the car.

When I arrived into the waiting room I was