New Pamphlet - Why is the Irish Health Service in Crisis

national | miscellaneous | press release Friday April 15, 2005 17:13 by SWP - SWP info at swp dot ie PO Box 1648 Dublin 8 01 8788170

New Pamphlet on Irish Health Service by Dr. Peadar O Grady

PRICE €3 OR €50 FOR 25 – CONTACT MELISA @ 01 8788170 OR melisa@swp.ie TO ORDER

Pamphlet front cover

After more than a decade of the Celtic Tiger economy, an economy characterised by spectacular profit rates, we have a health service which plummets daily to new depths of depravity.

The situation in the Accident & Emergency Departments has reached such calamitous proportions that patients’ relatives, in their distress, frustration and anger, spontaneously set up ‘Patients Together’ and came on to the streets of Dublin to try and get something done to alleviate the horror in our A&E Departments.

As nurses, under the slogan ‘Enough is Enough’ we are engaged in a series of lunchtime protest actions against what are not only intolerable conditions for our patients, but also for ourselves as workers.

But what is wrong with the health service in Ireland, a country which, according to the latest economic reports, is now the 4th richest country on the planet?

How can it be possible that, despite such unbelievable wealth, we have a health service which is now worse than it was in the 1980s when the country was in the depths of recession and threatened by bankruptcy?

In answer to these questions and to a population desperate for solutions, the Government has pushed the ‘bottomless pit theory’. Creaking with bureaucratic chains and choked by trade union powers, the health service, the theory goes, is a bottomless pit of wasted billions. Essentially, it insists that a state-run public health service is inherently inefficient. What is required, it argues, is the tying down of the trade unions even further by deals like ‘Sustaining Progress’ and the tendering out of as much of the health services as is possible to the Private Sector.

This pamphlet cuts straight across this argument. Far from ‘the bottomless pit’, Peadar O’Grady demonstrates that the Irish Health Service was stripped of its resources from the mid 1980s into the 1990s and continued, for the greater period of the Celtic Tiger, to receive well below average EU funding as a proportion of GDP.

He further argues that there is a global plan for health care. But it is a plan that is not concerned with the delivery of health care to those who need it. It is concerned only with the profits that can be creamed out of the provision of health care to those who can afford to pay for it.

Both as patients and workers we face a stark choice:

Either we fight for a health service delivered on the basis of need by a work force properly paid for the work we do,

Or we have imposed on us a US model of health service delivered only to those who can pay and returning vast profits to the vested interests

"This pamphlet makes the case for a real fight to end the crisis and to stop the drive towards privatisation. It is an important contribution to the debate about defending health care as a public service that needs to be had both in our unions and society as a whole.”

Jo Tully Irish Nurses Organisation (INO) Executive (Personal capacity)