I often marvel at Channel 4’s 24 Hours in A&E - how they don’t seem to have corridors lined with patients on trolleys, or elderly people sitting in plastic chairs for hours. Their staff – while under pressure – don’t seem to be at their wit’s end with their working conditions. And I also marvel at how patients are treated with dignity and offered privacy at what is a very distressing time in their lives.

When it comes to trolleys in our Emergency Departments, the only agreement that can be reached is that “we are where we are”.

"Moveable screens – the type we all became familiar with in TV show M*A*S*H – are now as common as blood pressure monitors and chiming alarms."

We have all visited an ED in Ireland, and we have all seen how they have degenerated into field hospitals. The slide has been gradual. I remember once being sent by my GP to one of my local hospitals and being accommodated in a new bay, with a bed of its own and a curtain that could have been drawn around. Two years later I found myself back in the same hospital to find that a third bed had been manoeuvred into the two-bed bay, meaning the curtain couldn’t close properly any more.

Two years later, again with a relative, back in the same bay where there were once two beds, there were now four. Not to mention the corridor outside that was lined with trolleys and chairs, patients and relatives, and a staff trying their best to cope with an unbearable workload. Moveable screens – the type we all became familiar with in TV show M*A*S*H – are now as common as blood pressure monitors and chiming alarms.
 
What has really happened is that we have come to accept failure as the norm. Trolleys are now part-and-parcel of the Irish hospital experience. Politicians have repeatedly said that this was going to end, and that patients would never again face the indignity of an examination in a public corridor. The pensioner -  always spoken of in the highest regard by said same Ministers as someone who had paid their taxes all their lives  - would never again face the discomfort of the plastic chair for hours on end. Yet, we are where we are.
 
What has happened this week with 600 people on trolleys in our hospitals is not an emergency. It is merely an escalation of the failure, spreading like an illness would throughout the hospital building. The Minister’s solution is to push a few extra beds onto wards, as it’s safer than having people crowd the ED. This proposal quite literally moves the problem upstairs. There is no mention of extra nurses or doctors to help those people (God knows where they’ll have to sleep) only that it’s the least worst option open to management.
 
The issue is that when you accept failure as the norm, then you will never solve the problem. Those beds being jammed into wards upstairs, instead of the ED, will soon become permanent, and the problem in the ED will most likely remain unresolved.

People expected much of Leo Varadkar. He’s hardly excelling in what is really his first test as Minister for Angola.