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Madam, – Can anyone explain why the persistent and dangerous overcrowding that afflicts Irish emergency departments remains unsolved and ignored? This Government moved very swiftly to deal with inadequacies in cancer services in the past two years when clinical errors, which had been highlighted in the press, made it obvious that improvements in service organisation and delivery were essential. Key elements in that improvement process were: a political will to sort it out, an analysis of the service as it was, a redirection of funding to key areas, reorganisation of services and, most importantly, co-ordination of all of this by the cancer tzar, Prof Tom Keane.