Health Minister Stephen Donnelly has insisted that this winter’s trolley crisis is different from previous ones - and argued that what we are seeing now “doesn’t happen every year”.
The Fianna Fáil TD also refused to answer whether he thought the case of a person aged 70 on a trolley for 57 hours was “borderline elder abuse”.
Trolley numbers usually peak in the first week of the new year following the return of services after the Christmas break.
