It has emerged that a debt collection company has written to a two-year-old child to seek €100 for an emergency visit to a local hospital.

It is claimed that the child from Roscommon could not get a visit from a local doctor-on-call – and had to be brought to the emergency department in Portiuncula for treatment.

But the hospital then used a debt collection agency to ask the child to pay the €100 charge for going to the emergency department without a doctor’s letter.

Local senator Terry Leyden says the fee should be waived: “I think in the circumstances, I ask you minister, that this matter should be resolved and waived because quite frankly the bill has been sent to the child, and the child is only two years of age and does not have €100 and the family are not in a position to pay it as well.”