‘Beep on the Street’ protest over UHL
The Midwest Hospital Campaign, incorporating Nenagh Needs Its A&E, has announced a unique day of action to address the persistent Emergency Department (ED) and overcrowding crisis at University Hospital Limerick (UHL).
The campaign team is calling for maximum effort from the community of North Tipperary, particularly those whose family or friends have been negatively impacted by the overcrowding at the hospital.
The campaign is inviting communities across the Mid-West to join in one of three vehicle convoys that will converge on Limerick city for the ‘Beep on the Street’ protest - also known as the Drive to Save Lives protest on Saturday, April 13. The plan is to have a convoy of cars, trucks, tractors, and vans and travel in convoy from Ennis and Nenagh.
A third convoy from Limerick city and county will join the protest from St John’s Hospital. As well as serving as a protest, the event is also intended to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the beginning of the disastrous reconfiguration of hospital services in the Midwest.
The Nenagh group asks that all vehicles should bear their county colours. Convoys of vehicles from the three affected counties will converge on O'Connell Street in Limerick at noon on April 13.
The North Tipperary convoy will assemble at Springfort Retail Park in Nenagh at 10.45am, departing at 11am. The three-county convoy will travel through O’Connell Street and onward to the HSE Offices, Houston Hall, Raheen Business Park.
The Nenagh Needs it’s A&E group in a statement said: “For fifteen years, the communities of the Midwest have been subjected to a deepening crisis as successive governments, the HSE and the Department of Health continue to stand over an utterly failed project that any private sector body would have ditched years earlier.
“For fifteen years, we have heard too many horror stories of lengthy, distressing, and injurious trolley waits at UHL. For fifteen years, hospital campaigners and their followers demanding the return of regional EDs, have been sneered at by political and medical elites for daring to suggest that we need to return to what we once had. The ‘clinical advisors’ who once deemed our regional EDs ‘unsafe’ are now in hiding. Many of those political and bureaucratic overlords who failed to upscale resources in UHL before downgrading the regional hospitals have long since begun collecting their hefty government pensions.
“We are asking people to join us for the Beep on the Street, on the Drive to Save Lives, on Saturday April 13. This is the fight of our generation in the Mid-West.”