The health system has been starved of funding to improve technology, according to the HSE Director General.

Tony O’Brien said that until recently a lack of capital investment in the health service meant they could not develop.

At the start of this year 36,000 HSE workers did not even have an email address they could be contacted on.

HSE Director General Tony O’Brien says the lack of funding stopped ICT growth: “Which is why we still have nursing homes in what are little more than workhouses from the last century.

“Which is why we still have emergency departments that are too small for the population trying to use them and it is one of the reasons, combined with some negativity about past projects, I mean for ten years until very recently the health system has been starved of much need investment and information, communication technology.”