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.

Ali’s defence of developers is not up my alley

I’ve always had respect for Ali Hewson. She has in the past supported many noteworthy good causes. It’s easy to dismiss such work as an excuse to expunge your guilt feelings about wealth and use your concern as a vehicle to socialise among the elite. That may be the case for some who go to these society charity events but Ali has a genuine track record on issues of child welfare internationally. She may be expert on how to divert cash to causes but that doesn’t make her infallible. While her husband collects US Presidents, his missus it seems collects builders!

I fully understand that when you take up such work, you throw yourself into it whole heartedly and often can loose sight of the bigger picture. At least that’s what I’m hoping is behind her recent remarks.
Ali says that the media treatment of developers who frequently attended her charity bashes is unjust. She justifies this criticism of the media because the developers who attended the society bashes were generous to her charities and regulars at the celeb fuelled bashes!
It strikes me as though the masters of the universe who controlled our economy have had enough of the ordinary people who are now forced to bail them out. Last week AIB decided to make an inhouse appointment to the top job contrary to guidelines, Sunday saw NAMA signed into law by the President and this week sees a public service strike in protest at government cuts in public service pay. It’s quite sometime since the IBEC spokesperson on the radio last wowed me with their “We’re all in it together” line.
The cynic inside me says that those with wealth have had enough of the ordinary
person’s indignation. They desperately want to go back to their addictive old ways of speculating as it’s more profitable than anything else. It’s a bit like Lassie making its home! Nothing will get in their way, not even the market reality. Let me quote one of the creators of the slump in 2000, Mary Harney;
“What really makes Ireland attractive to corporate America is the kind of economy which we have created here. They find a country that believes in the incentive power of low taxation. They find a country that believes in economic liberalization(She spelt it with a “z” rather than an “s”!). They find a country that believes in essential regulation but not over regulation. On looking further afield in Europe they find that not every European country believes in these things….This model works.. And I say if it ain’t broke don’t fix it… There are some who want to create a more centralized Europe…I don’t think it would be in Ireland’s interests and I don’t think it would be in Europe’s interests either ”
You now this speech better as her Boston or Berlin speech. It’s nearly 10 years since she delivered it and it took just 7 years for her analysis to collapse. What is stunning is that the economic liberal right in Ireland have no other approach to reviving the economy . The attempt to take the nation down another cul de sac is under way,
For the Harney’s and Hewson’s of this world there can be no going back, no re-creating a second bubble. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.

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.

Vaccine “row” that takes 3 months to start

Some months ago I posted here on my support for the cervical cancer vaccine Gardasil. Approximately 200 women die each year from the condition in the Republic of Ireland. This condition is in the news as the Reality TV personality Jade Goody is now in the terminal stages of this form of cancer. The vaccine if introduced would over a long period of time reduce incidence of the condition in Ireland. The occurence of cervical cancer is set to rise by 1.5% per year so when my daughters are in their middle age it may well have doubled. I was particularly disappointed that the Health minister Mary Harney had withdrawn her plans to vaccinate young girls as I knew it mean that while the likes of me could afford to buy the vaccine for my daughters at the appropriate age, others would not. In short I don’t believe a woman’s health should be subject to the family’s ability to pay. It is unusual to vaccinate against a cancer and that’s because in the case of cervical cancer about 66% of cases are caused by a virus HPV. So eventually you could expect about 130 lives to be saved by a policy of vaccination
Arising from my view I joined a facebook group. I subsequently received an email out of the blue from an opponent of the vaccine who claimed that the full truth of the vaccine was not being told. She went on to say I was playing Russian roulette with my child’s health. I disliked the attitude of the group so much that after the second email I received I replied asking them not to contact me again.

Roll forward 3 months and I got an email from the Sunday Tribune setting out the activists complaint that I’d been unfair to her. It seems the activist has approached the paper setting out a number of complaints against the facebook group as she was removed from it eventually. Cllr Ryan in Wexford is charged with asking her not to waste politician’s time. What has the world come to that I’m expected to indulge someone who peddles bad science simply because the unfortunate Jade Goody is in the news for the worst of reasons? Lets get this clear, The vaccine is licensed in the US by the FDA, here by the Irish Medicines Board and HSE. The noted oncologist Prof John Crown also backs the vaccine. Lets me direct on this, If I was diagnosed with a cancer, John Crown is the man I’d look for.

Anyhow today the Tribune says that there is a row and that reader's can conclude that Councillor Ryan is in the eye of the storm! Well in the immortal words of Mohammed Ali, Do I look bruised? I’ll get over it but the reality is that there are women for whom cervical cancer is neither a campaign against a vaccine nor a debate about science but a serious life threatening condition. Bruised? It's worse than that. These women are hurting and it’s a pain and fear I’ll not have to experience because I’m male and that my daughters can hopefully avoid. That’s a reality I’d like to see much less of.