Public health care: Serious consideration will be given to escalating the strike by public health doctors unless the Minister for Health, Mr Martin, brings specific proposals to solve the dispute to the annual meeting of the Irish Medical Organisation in Killarney today, the union warned last night.
The IMO's industrial relations director, Mr Fintan Hourihan, said many public health doctors would be leaving the picket line today and travelling to Kerry to hear what the Minister had to say in his address to delegates. It will be the first face-to-face meeting between the Minister and the State's 270 public health doctors since they went on strike over pay and working conditions 11 days ago.
"There is serious consideration being given to involving wider groups of doctors and widening the locations of this strike. We will hear what the Minister says and people will make their mind up after that," he said.
Mr Martin has had a long-standing arrangement to address the meeting.
Mr Hourihan said however he was not optimistic about an early resolution of the dispute. A letter to the IMO from Mr Martin, which proposed an agenda for talks, was restrictive and not enough to get doctors back to work, he added.
Mr Brendan Mulligan, head of industrial relations at the Health Services Employers Agency, accused the IMO of not wanting to enter talks until they knew what the outcome was going to be. He urged them to resume talks, saying "nothing is on or off the table".
Since the strike began numerous letters have been exchanged but Mr Mulligan said the dispute could not be settled through correspondence. "The IMO seems to be intent on writing letters to us in the middle of the night and it's just not going to work out that way. We have to get around the table," he said.
"We would hope common sense would prevail," he added.
Mr Hourihan accused the HSEA of inept handling of the dispute and said they obviously had "their wires crossed again".
Meanwhile, the implementation body urged both sides to refer the dispute to the Labour Court. The body, established under the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness and continued under Sustaining Progress, said both sides had made a commitment to jointly refer matters of this type to "the appropriate industrial relations machinery" if agreement could not be reached through negotiations.
It recommended that industrial action be suspended.
Last night one of the striking public health doctors Dr Darina O'Flanagan, head of the National Disease Surveillance Centre, told Primetime that the Chinese woman released from a Dublin hospital to a hostel at the weekend, even though she was suspected to have SARS, would not have been sent to the hostel if public health doctors were not on strike. "We'd have ensured a more appropriate place to send her," she said.