Madam, – Sara Burke (Opinion, June 27th) writes about the public/private divide in healthcare in Ireland. I find it very tiresome reading over and over again this ideologically-motivated propaganda. Miss Burke's article is so confused, so incoherent and so lacking in intellectual rigour that I'm amazed it could be published in such an august newspaper as The Irish Times.
Having told us that private patients are less well treated than public patients, Miss Burke’s main argument appears (I did my best to try to interpret it) to be that the public healthcare system in Ireland is bad because of the existence of private healthcare. I listened to this nonsense in the UK in relation to the NHS for many years and I just don’t accept it.
What Miss Burke has to explain is why the HSE, with the vast financial and manpower resources at its disposal, is not capable of providing an adequate service. The HSE has enough money to provide excellent healthcare.
With the resources at its disposal, it should be capable of delivering a level of healthcare that would induce all of us to use it and forego private healthcare completely.
To suggest that this failure is due to the existence of a parallel private system is quite implausible and represents intellectual laziness of the highest order.
Until we find an explanation for that failure, the views presented by Sara Burke are nothing more than uninformed ideology. – Yours, etc,