Enough of Harney picking over the nation's carcass!

Few Ministers have presided for as long as Mary Harney in the history of the state. She’s spent 12 years in office continuously and add to that the period that she spent as a successful Junior Minister at Environment where she pioneered smokeless fuel. Her senior at the time was Padraig Flynn and the pair were nickname Smog n’ Smug!
When Harney transferred to Health in 2004 she told us that she’d bring her business like approach to health and shorten waiting lists, improve services and give us a first class health service. After the latest scandal at Tallaght Hospital she’s no nearer her goal than she was over 5 years ago when she took up the job. In 2005 she said she wanted a 7 year stint to complete her job. Her optimism is groundless, she’s brought us no nearer a better health service. It’s about time we as a nation heeded her advice from another issue and shopped around for another Health Minister.

She really has a dreadful record, Missed diagnosis at Port Laoise, Galway, Limerick, Hospital closures in Monaghan, Ennis, Dundalk as well as the infamous reconfiguration of the Mid-West, North East, South, and South East, the Co Location financing of private hospitals, PPARS, Failure to regulate the nursing home sector, A&E charge doubling in the last 5 years and all the time physiotherapy and psychological services for children services are long fingered as Ms Harney hones her taste for foreign travel. Her constant companion in clocking up the air miles is her FAS veteran husband. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, particularly if your on a waiting list for surgery on a vegas nerve.

The ire of most people is kept for her creation , HSE. Patients are glad of a service and appreciate the work done on wards, in operating theatres and clinics up and down the country. What they want to see is more. We are told that Ireland is striving towards best international practise and that at the end the HSE will be held up as a model for other small countries, consultant led teams treating patients in modern speciality hospitals. What we’ve mostly got so far is duplication of management and a Minister who fundamentally cannot distinguish between a social economy and a market. Since 2005 civil servants in the Health Department mirror the HSE employees who work in brand new offices on the Millennium Park HSE complex, leased from her good friend by tax payers. Amid the chaos Harney refers question on health the political section of the HSE. When the Head of the HSE Professor Drumm goes to meet TD’s its bedlam as about 100 deputies try to question him about the implications of his decisions in their own area in a limited amount of time.


I’m fed up with those who run our health system stumbling from crisis to crisis. Where will it be next month? Can we afford any longer Harney’s clichés? Fair deal or “If it was just a question of money it’d be solved by now”. The sad reality is that Harney has demoralised the staff and frightened the general public into an expectation of poor standards in our hospitals. The reality is otherwise. Recently one of my children broke their arm. I went to Wexford General Hospital at 5 PM. My son was x-rayed, diagnosed, treated and referred to a fracture clinic within 2 hours. There are good experiences in our health services to be had in spite of the quality of leadership at top.

So what is the way forward? The genie is out of the bottle, accountability is gone, every day Wexford gets closer to a re-configuration that will mean the service delivery in the South East is regionally based rather than local. If there is a change of government in the morning this roll out won’t change because management have been given control of delivery. It’s reconfiguration or nothing!

The forthcoming re-shuffle is fundamentally different to what Ahern did in 2004 when he morphed into a socialist who broke bread with Fr Sean Healey. That transformed FF in the polls and set them up for 2007. The forthcoming reshuffle is predicated against taxpayers being taken to the cleaners to keep bankers, developers and FF in clover. The most potent expression “There’s no NAMA for me” says it all. There’ll be no bailout for FF, Harney and the Greens.
Enough is enough, The health minister should return from New Zeeland to take control of the latest crisis. Then Harney should be shown the door at the reshuffle, accountability has to start.

Even the ancillary workers came out in sympathy!

Today’s public sector strike has seen a significant show of support for the call by ICTU to oppose public sector pay cuts. The media has portrayed the strike as effectively shutting schools and hospitals. However the real impact has gone much further than that.
In Wexford Town government buildings in Anne St are closed. This means that the Revenue Commissioners, Probation Service, Department of Social and Family Affairs are shut. Round the corner on Crescent Quay, the offices of Wexford Borough Council are closed with a large picket in place. This means that those wishing to enquire about local authority housing cannot do so, fines can’t be paid, rent or rates cannot be collected and planning applications cannot be lodged or inspected. At the local authority depot in Whitemill Industrial Estate pickets since 7.30 AM have been in place. This means maintenance on houses won’t be carried out, streets won’t be swept nor roads repaired. Fro the first time in many years traffic can move down Wexford’s Main St as there’s no one to block it at 11AM.

At County Hall similar pickets ensure that bins won’t be collected, water bills cannot be paid nor any leaks in the system be fixed and Wexford is a county with regular problems in water supply. Environment, Planning and Enforcement are also closed meaning that any contravention of planning law can go unchecked today. At the Garda station the small Social Welfare office is picketed and while the garda are not on strike it was evident to me as I made my own way for picket duty at lunch time that gardaí were sympathetic to the strikers.
Yes, the schools were on strike and while second level teachers picketed their own schools the primary teachers picketed offices in the Cornmarket as did the NEPS employees. Co Wexford VEC was also shut with pickets at Ardcavan. Next door at the District Court and the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, pickets are also on duty. The office of the Department of Agriculture, at Johnstown Castle, was also shut by pickets. Wexford General Hospital also had a picket at the front gate although it’s relocation off a side road made the protest less evident. So the effect has been significantly more than kids not getting taught. Grants are not being processed by the department and routine operations are deferred at WGH.

By and large the response from the public has been supportive although I did notice one man who rolled down the window of his silver luxury Mercedes to tell us we should be ashamed of ourselves as we picketed. He returned 10 minutes later to tell us that he paid €40K last year in tax and that he paid our wages and that we should go back to work. Now given that the tax was €40K I reckon he surely grossed €180K in annual income. Strangely he didn’t say what he was going to contribute to get the state out of this slump.
That said, I’ve got to mention a parent that sent in a box of chocolates to the early morning picket. Much appreciated. I hope the chocs last as it seems likely that we’ll be on picket duty sooner rather than later.

When is a joke not a joke and when A&E is sidelined

This week’s Wexford People leads with a comment that John Browne TD made at the Rally in support of Wexford General Hospital last Sunday night. As part of his address to 1,000 people, including myself who had gathered in Whites Hotel, Deputy Browne told us that his daughter who’s in a wheelchair and is 23 asked him to oppose cutting back opening hours at Wexford’s A&E because he claimed she needed it when drunk and that she didn’t want to stop drinking.
It’s a shame that the meeting’s purpose has been diverted by such a remark because people turned out on an autumn evening to listen to politicians, a consultant, nurses, EMT’s and staff set out their concerns about the future of Accident and Emergency at Wexford General Hospital. Our deputy, Brendan Howlin had worked hard to promote the meeting for some time and has tenaciously highlighted how the hospital is being run primarily by accountants rather than doctors. His website contains a petition and if you follow the supplied link you can sign the petition and add your name to the list of those opposed to any downgrading of our generla hospital.

Lets get to the point of the meeting, Dr Colm Quigley succinctly set out what the HSE network group are looking at in terms of re-configuration of services. He set out which services had been transferred to ensure a better service to the county and what he felt he needed to ensure acute services and A&E could continue to be delivered better at Wexford General. Nobody demurred from the theme of the meeting. If anything the meeting could have gone on for longer as the chairman brought down the curtain with a motion committing to re-meet when the network report is published. I had the chance at the end of the meeting to talk with Dr Quigley and ask if the ambulance service was capable of delivering a service to Co Wexford in the context of A&E moving to Waterford and as to whether the EMT’s were available to crew ambulances. His reply was one that gave me a sense of both the betrayal and frustration that is obvious in some consultants at middle size hospitals such as Sligo or Wexford at present.
I don’t accept John Browne’s explanation of the comments as joke, no more than I think Tommy Tiernan’s Anti-Jewish remarks at Electric Picnic were funny. Both Tiernan and Browne have effectively highjacked a serious issue for the purpose of self promotion. Families of politicians are effectively off limits in the context of political attacks, but how does one respond when a politician humiliates a member of his family as a means of self-promotion. As I listened to John speak, I could barely believe what I was hearing. What John said was gormless, crass and in bad taste. It is telling that he believes most 23 year olds interaction with A&E is to deal with excessive alcohol consumption. Last year I attended a conference where Senator Phil Prendergast set out how medical staff in A&E’s feel threatened by violence from people with excessive alcohol. It’s no laughing matter, I can tell you. He doesn’t need to explain himself to the people of Wexford however and most of important of all, he needs to apologise to his daughter

FF TD’s resignation stunt officially opens the silly season

I don’t think anyone is fooled anymore by the antics of the 2 FF TD’s in Sligo. They’re wasting their breath spoofing the country. The local FF TD’s in Yeat’s own county have weaved their own spell in words, sounding concerned but doing precious little about it. Because of the centralistion of cancer care in Galway they’ve resigned the FF whip. The 2 TD’s studiously avoid the facts that the NW is the last regions to get breast check on their watch almost 10 years after it was rolled out elsewhere in the country. Where was the FF deputies concern then?


One who is known as a former Minster for State at the Department of Health and was recently sacked by the Taoiseach and the other not even a household name in his own household. The boys are obviously fed up with getting it on the neck from the local electorate about how the HSE is downgrading the local hospital and have opted for the politics of gesture not action. Lets get this straight, Deputy Devins, emphasises he’s still very much a member of Fianna Fail, he wants to only make an issue of local cancer care and doesn’t seem too put out by the other government cuts and to be fair to him he can’t as he voted for them all. So Special Needs Assistants, garda cutbacks, the cutbacks in REPS, social welfare cuts and waiting lists at the HSE everywhere else are something he’ll live with. Indeed even more, he’ll re-join FF in the future according to his interview with Philip Boucher Hayes. Are they going to bite the bullet and vote against FF in the Dail? Not now, not ever, unless a motion is put down to provide cancer services in Sligo.

So if both deputies are genuine in all that they hope to achieve and are confident that they have the people of Sligo behind them then should they not resign their seats and force by-elections, seeking a mandate in the area against the proposed cuts in cancer care and then go back to Brian Cowan with their hand strengthened? Anything less to my mind is self serving and cynical, as was the statement by one deputy that it wasn’t about his seat!

So what are the lessons for us in Wexford? Here we also have 2 FF deputies who’ve made known in the privacy of their parliamentary party meetings unfortunately in the absence of our Minister for Health, Mary Harney. So far their efforts have come to nought so I’ll let you conclude how effective any utterance is in FF. So when the special HSE group reconfiguring the south east hospital recommend the downgrading of A&E in Wexford General Hospital, what will Deputy John Browne (another Junior Minister sacked by Cowan) and Seán Connick do?

Both owe Cowen precious little. John Browne’s long cherished desire to serve in cabinet will go unfulfilled, Connick surely knows he’ll be around for an awful lot longer in political terms than Cowen and surely will note what FF TD’s did exactly 30 years ago when they felt that their seats were in danger during the last Jack Lynch government.
30 years ago FF backbenchers stuck it into the leadership, the question is now have they the bottle now to fight for their communities or not? I wonder did WB Yeats have Fianna Fail in mind when he wrote “I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed a waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind, In balance with this life”?

Wexford General Hospital, Monaghan for the next decade

Following the decision to take Monaghan off call and complete the downgrading process, HSE network management probably feels that at last the monkey is off their back and if they can pull off the retreat from Monaghan then anywhere; Ennis, Nenagh, Mallow, Bantry or Wexford is on for downgrading. Somehow I don’t think so. The people of Monaghan have been successfully ignored by the HSE. The connection between the community and care is gone, if you’re sick in Monaghan the reality is that you should go to either Cavan or Drogheda and join the queues in those counties. Now that might please many people if they knew that there were no queues and no trolleys there but the reality is different.
The old health boards were lambasted because of political representations interfering with clinical decisions and best practise but now it seems they were only interfering with economies of scale. In time communities will reflect benevolently on the days when the local councillor could raise the local issue of health care in a local forum. Now it’s no more. When I have a question about health I usually pass it on to Brendan Howlin who’ll then ask a question to Minister Mary Harney who’ll refer it on to the HSE political section responding that the question is not longer a matter for the Dept of Health and Children but the HSE. The HSE will parrot back to confirm the personal details and then set out the theoretical path along which the patient should follow and state that global position of the HSE in relation to the medical problem and in the end the patient is no closer to being dealt with. So after all the paper moving from councillor to deputy to Minister to Agency nothing is achieved and no one is treated.

Wexford General Hospital was officially opened 17 years ago, by Albert Reynolds, during a General Election. It is a modern 2 storey building that replaced a 19th century county hospital. Opening it during a campaign was an overt sign that FF accepted the political importance of medicine a few years after their then leader Charlie Haughey said he couldn’t know how much health cuts had hit despite being elected of the back of a campaign saying health cuts hit the old the sick and the handicapped. Everything that has happened at the hospital has to be seen in a political context. Be it cancer care or a CAT scanner, the money was raised in the county and the HSE was reluctant to put up their own cash.

The campaign for 19 beds was conceded in the run in to the 2007 General Election, the failure of the manager to meet with Wexford Borough Councillors before the Local Elections amid an application to build an extension to triple Waterford’s A&E capacity as well as the decision to set up a consultative group to evaluate the proposal to consolidate health care in the south east around a centre of excellence which is HSE speak for Waterford.
I’ve always seen the hospital as a general hospital, ie they don’t specialise but refer you on to a specialist team who’ll deal directly with the problem. So if you have a serious head injury they bring you on to Beaumont. If you need serious surgery then expect it to be done in Dublin or Cork where teams specialise and recuperate in Wexford. That’s the way it’s been but now with A&E to close, the hospital will become a centre for minor elective surgery, maternity, paediatrics while the future of acute wards will certainly hang in the balance. Coronary care and intensive care generally rely on A & E for a throughput. So what will happen there?
Wexford A&E has each year about 30,000 cases many of whom are admitted. It’s a very busy department taking admissions from throughout the county. What the move to Waterford will mean is an increase in spending on new ambulances and EMT personnel. I’ve been told by a senior member of staff in WGH that a medic there has evaluated death rate against distance based on Australian figures he can source and he forecasts an increase of 8% in deaths. Clonmel, Kilkenny and Wexford will all lose their A&E’s if the HSE get their way and it’s a case of driving across Waterford presumably on the new by-pass when it opens next year and join Mary Harney’s queue there. The network management plan will be wheeled out later this year by an anonymous group who won’t consult with local political reps. In the background is the spectre of Swine Flu and what happens now in a hospital with low staff morale where swine flu coincides with winter vomitting bug? Expect the worse and stay healthy.

Campaign notes from the south east

With less than 2 weeks to go, and from my point of view 50 weeks gone the finishing post is within sight. There’s been a good response to our campaign not just in Wexford but more importantly in Enniscorthy. It’s been 10 years since Labour last held a seat there. Local newspapers are suggesting that Labour will gain a seat there at the expense of Fianna Fail. Pat Cody and Francis O’Connor are our candidates there and they are doing a really good job at shaking up politics there. That will be significant as it will effectively change the balance of power on the council in the backyard of a former Junior Minister.
There are subtle changes since 2007. There are more people at home by day, less out, working more at home. One phenomenon that I remember from the 2007 General Election was the number of houses where there were builders boots outside the front door. I remember that if you saw just dirt on the doorstep you could conclude that the builders were out. I commented on that at the time to Brendan Howlin and soon we watched for houses with Polsat satellite dishes. Further evidence of a builders who probably had no vote and were non national. A sign of the times we’re in is that there’s much less sight of boots at the door now.
I debated on South East Radio on Friday morning with Ger Walsh Independent, Barbara Anne Murphy & Martin Murphy (FF) and Anna Fenlon (FG). It was a very civilised affair as each candidate was asked about their own area. In reality the issues in an urban area like Wexford can be significantly different to Bunclody or Campile and their rural hinterland. We all took up our party’s view on the economy. Ger Walsh surprised me by saying he was opposed to bank nationalisation. As someone who had previously spent some time in the Labour Party where nationalisation would be favoured I reflected on how far he moved in political terms.
National issues are raising themselves on the doorstep but there are local issues like potholes, schools or as may surface soon Wexford General Hospital. It seems that the HSE is planning to limit out of hours A&E cover after 12 midnight. This would require people needing emergency medical attention to go to either Loughlinstown or Waterford both hospitals with their own catchments and populations to cover. So now under the Greens and Fianna Fail you can queue 24 hours around the clock in a hospital. I’m aghast that this is a runner especially at election time, surely anyone with a political bone in their body would know not to propose this in the middle of an election.
There’s nothing like a diversion from politics especially in the middle of an election and nothing better than a family celebration. Sunday sees our daughter’s First Communion. I’ve taken a break over the week-end from the campaign so as to prepare for it. Once its over its back to work on the stump. Lets go!