The new medical block and emergency department at Letterkenny General Hospital which cost more than €24M to complete is due to open shortly.

The opening is not without controversy but Letterkenny General manager Sean Murphy told the Irish Independent, “I’m open to the idea of showing people who opposed the ward closure the excellent new facilities,”

He was keen to show off the fact that 58 of the beds in the new medical centre are single room wards where female patients would have “absolute privacy.”

“The fact is that there is no such thing as a female-only ward; there will always be staff who are male whether that is doctors, or porters or nurses,” said Mr Murphy.

“There are no mixed sex rooms here (at the new Medical Block) because most of them are single rooms. If there are people who remain unconvinced about what we are doing then we would be happy to show them around.

“We got the agreement of the staff last week and without that agreement we could not have opened this new facility. Those are the facts we are dealing with because we wouldn’t have had the staff to do so.”