Fianna Fáil's Dara Calleary said the Government was ignorant of the problem created by a 1,000 per cent increase in the numbers on health waiting lists.

"I cannot understand why the Minister for Health, Leo Varadkar, who has the courage to tell it as it is, gets slapped down and those who were cheerleaders for this disaster, this crime against the citizens of the country, are promoted within the Government," he added.

Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Richard Bruton, who was taking leaders' questions, said everyone recognised the challenges in the health service. Since 2008, the Department of Health and HSE budgets had been cut by €3.8 billion and there had been a very significant reduction in staff.

Despite that, the Department of Health and the health services were increasing their treatment of patients, he said. “Some 115,000 more patients are being treated in our hospitals today than was the case four years ago; so much more work is being done.”

Mr Bruton said another aspect was that the emergency department workload had significantly increased, putting pressure on elective surgery. “We need to move to systems that can better manage the flow and we still have problems with that,” he added.

“Too many people are turning up in the emergency department when they could be treated in primary care and that strategy is to roll out primary care.” He said the reform plan was clearly on the right track, but there were difficulties.

Mr Calleary said the clinical director in the Minister’s local hospital, Beaumont, had described some of the facilities as unsafe and added that 350 GPs had taken to the streets to wake up the Government to the primary care crisis.