A new hospital in Spain, to help Irish patients on long waiting lists, is a further indictment of our health service.

That's according to Independent Kerry TD Michael Healy-Rae, who was speaking as the facility in Alicante aims to carry out around 1,500 treatments a year.

Irish people can access healthcare in Spain under the European Union Cross-Border Directive.

Under the directive, patients pay for their treatment in the EU and are then reimbursed by the HSE.

Picture by: YouTube/HCB Hospitales

Deputy Healy-Rae told Lunchtime Live he welcomes the initiative.

"Obviously nothing only good luck to the promoters of it, the people who are operating it and I wish them every good luck with it and success.

"But it's a further indictment of the chaotic scenes that we have here in Ireland.

"We have 900,000 people, 100,000 of them are children, and now we have a new thing happening at the moment... where people who have been diagnosed with different types of cancers now have to wait for those operations.

"There was one time you could have an operation if it was urgent and required - but even urgent operations now are being held up and put back."

Deputy Healy-Rae believes this Spanish hospital could be a solution.

"I'm not saying that it's not a solution, I haven't said anything critical about this service.

"But what I'm saying is bad luck to the people here that can't run our service properly".

Picture by: YouTube/HCB Hospitales

But he says it also shows the incompetence of the Irish system.

"I've been carrying patients to the North for years under the Cross-Border Initiative - to be blunt about it - to save their eyesight.

"And it's a very good service - but what I always say to people: Isn't it a shame to think that on a Sunday morning surgeons can go in up to a hospital above in Belfast and do a busload of patients for me.

"They can come down the road on Sunday evening with one patch over their eye, and in a few days time they're on the road and they can see perfectly well.

"To think that we can't do that here - what is so wrong, what is so incompetent with our health service?

"It's not an ideal situation, is it, when we have to - what I'd call - outsource our healthcare.

"We have to buy the healthcare abroad because we're too incompetent and too incapable to give the people the necessary operations they need here".