Failure to tackle vested interests is turning a sick health service into a dangerous one.
This year over a billion pounds of our money will be spent on the health service, yet cutbacks are making the hospitals dangerous and public patients can't get urgent operations. One in twenty people in the Irish workforce works in the health system, yet wards full of geriatric patients are left unattended/
Fintan O'Toole, Mary Jane O'Brien and Mark Brennock find out why.
A 40 foot high, 147 acre plateau of mining waste is lying in a valley near Nenagh, Co Tipperary. When the wind rises, clouds of poisonous dust blow from the plateau onto neighbouring land causing human ilness and the death of animals. The problem is getting worse.
IT WAS COMING UP TO EIGHT O'CLOCK ON THE MORNING OF MONDAY MAY 28. AT 23 IONA ROAD, JOHN KENnedy was on the point of leaving for work, making van deliveries across the city and into the country. Shortly before he left the house he went into Niall Rush's bedroom to call him. Niall mumbled something to John, fell back to sleep. About two hours later, he was woken up by Shay O'Brien,· a friend of his who called to the house. Shay went down to boil the kettle, make some tea.
OVER THE PAST' THREE months, Minister for Health Barry Desmond has given an increased allocation of £2 million to the cardiac surgery unit in Dublin's Mater Hospital. The Mater unit is the only one in the country where open-heart surgery can be performed on adult patients. It is under severe pressure, as the demand for surgery far exceeds the unit's ability to provide it. By Mary Raftery
The death has occured of Mr Bertie Kennedy of Ballyneale, Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary. Mr Kennedy was 37.
Gene Kerrigan went to the Great Contraception Trial in Kildare.
A couple of gardai were smoking in court at a minute past eleven, but that didn't matter because it would be at least another five minutes before Justice Frank Johnston arrived on the bench. There's no law says the law can't take it's time. An Inspector suggested to the gardai standing near the door that they might move those TV people out of the hall. They shouldn't really be filming in there at all, you know.
The costs of the health services have increased eleven-fold in the last 12 years. The major beneficiaries have been the doctors, the pharmacists, the drug companies and the politicians who have retained votes by opposing the rationalisation of the hospital service. The health of the community has marginally worsened.
Replying to the Magill expose of the state of mental hospitals the Minister for Health, Dr. Michael Woods, stated in the course of a written answer in the Dail on November 12, that a number of hospitals had been successfully adapted and renovated and provided a service of "the highest quality" but that "significantly, perhaps" none of these featured in the Magill investigation.
During a radio interview on Wednesday, October 15, the Minister for Health, Dr. Woods, stated that many of the photographs published in the October issue of Magill depicting the state of mental hospitals were of a building in St. Brendan's Hospital, Grangegorman, Dublin, and that this building had since been evacuated. The point of his remarks was to suggest that we have exaggerated the condition of mental hospitals and of St. Brendan's in particular.
Over 14,000 people, more than the population of Kilkenny, live in mental hospitals in Ireland. Most of them live in conditions of squalor and dilapidation utterly inadequate for their therapeutic needs. And because of deliberate Government action these conditions are now going to worsen. Helen Connolly reports on the dire state of Ireland's mental health facilities.