Health minister accused of being 'dismissive' of safety concerns at CUH

A Cork TD and a lead consultant in CUH have both accused the health minister of being dismissive of concerns raised by the hospital’s CEO around unsafe staffing.

Its CEO Jennifer Kearney asked in a letter to the HSE for the approval of a minimum of 172 priority posts ahead of winter, a fraction of the total figure of more than 1,050 staff she said the hospital is down.

Health minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill said on RTÉ radio that the hospital has had a “very significant increase in staffing” and that other hospitals are managing with less resources.

Cork Social Democrats TD Liam Quaide, who used to work at CUH, described the minister’s comments as “extraordinarily dismissive”.

“What is striking is the attempt to turn a staffing deficit, created by Government, into a management failing,” he said.

The chairman of the CUH consultant staff committee, Professor Greg Fulton, accused the minister of “taking a crack at our CEO”.

He added: “We’d urge her not to be quite so dismissive of our position.”

A HSE South West spokesperson told The Echo that at the end of last month, CUH was operating at 258.67 whole-time equivalent (WTE) staff above its approved workforce limit.

The spokesperson was asked whether the figure of almost 260 staff above CUH’s approved workforce limit means that the HSE would like to see staff reductions in the hospital; how the limit was decided; and if it was a concern that the limit appears to be at odds with what the hospital’s CEO says is required.

The spokesperson said that there was no embargo on the recruitment of approved and funded posts in CUH: “There is, however, a newly-introduced sequencing process to manage the significant overruns that have occurred in CUH and across the service.”

This new sequencing process comes as Ms Kearney, in her letter, blamed “increasingly bureaucratic processes around the prioritisation and re-prioritisation of posts, rather than timely resolution of the underlying clinical need” for the staffing issues.

“Services are already reducing capacity, cancelling patients, and relying on expensive temporary solutions.”

New figures show that agency staff spending at the hospital is set to increase again this year. Over €10.4m has already been spent on agency staff in 2026 to June, while €19m was spent in the whole of 2025.

The staff figures were provided to Sinn Féin TD Thomas Gould, who said: “The Government is restricting direct recruitment with one hand, while paying private agencies a substantial premium with the other.

“Public money in Cork should build permanent frontline capacity, not fuel private agency profits.”