Madam, – Mary Harney gave herself five years to sort out the health service. She created the HSE to achieve this. Five years on, an audit finds serious waste of money in the HSE and all the Minister can offer is that this is not acceptable and will be addressed. What was she doing for the last five years? And should the audit not have come first, not last?
The Taoiseach’s response is to tell us that there have been real improvements in health provision and that a very large number of people had a good interaction with the service (Breaking News, October 6th). All he is doing is echoing Ms Harney’s constant refrain to this effect.
She regularly recites the short litany of what she claims are the successes of the HSE, studiously avoiding and evading the much longer list of disasters, scandals and even tragedies that blight the record of the HSE.
She also tells us about the great service patients receive when they interact with frontline health workers, even quoting opinion polls to back her up, thus deflecting attention from where the real problems lie, with the system and its managers.
Recently, Ms Harney told us that patients would suffer unless a radical process of change were implemented. But they have been suffering all the five years that Ms Harney had to make sure those changes were implemented. She implicitly accuses frontline staff of not living up to the Croke Park agreement. But the mess that is the HSE predates the Croke Park agreement by almost five years.
It is her mess. Why is she still here? Taoiseach? – Yours, etc,