The Fine Gael thread

[Ulick]

Vast majority of the people will have a little more in their pockets from 1st January.
Sorting out our Health Service seems to be beyond human capability.
However I hope none of ye ever have to use a real third world health service.

"A little extra" in their pockets means fck all in a society where half the population are living in absolute fear of what will happen them and their families because they won't be able to afford adequate treatment if they get sick.

[foxcommander]

Vast majority of the people will have a little more in their pockets from 1st January.
Sorting out our Health Service seems to be beyond human capability.
However I hope none of ye ever have to use a real third world health service.

You mean Fine Gael and Labour have failed too?

[SLIGONIAN]

Vast majority of the people will have a little more in their pockets from 1st January.
Sorting out our Health Service seems to be beyond human capability.
However I hope none of ye ever have to use a real third world health service.

Have you?

Also starving a Health system of funds so you can force through privatization is exactly what and irish and british govts are doing.

And by saying vast majority you mean corporations and by more money you mean taking it away from us elsewhere....

[Rossfan]

Vast majority of the people will have a little more in their pockets from 1st January.
Sorting out our Health Service seems to be beyond human capability.
However I hope none of ye ever have to use a real third world health service.

"A little extra" in their pockets means fck all in a society where half the population are living in absolute fear of what will happen them and their families because they won't be able to afford adequate treatment if they get sick.

I've had 2 serious ailments and got treated and sorted out by the Health Service.
Excellent treatment and now fully cured.
I wonder how were SinnPain  going to improve the Health Services seeing as all they have to offer is abolishing taxes.
How right wing

[AZOffaly]

Once you are in the health system, it's not bad from my, thankfully, limited experience. The doctors and nurses are great.

It's A&E that is the biggest blight on the health service. I had to go into my sister in law who was in A&E with her little lad, with a chest infection. She was waiting to see a doctor, but was at least in a cubicle with a bed and curtain around them.

Outside was like a war zone. Trollies everywhere, and a plasma screen that said average wait to see doctor was 7 hours. That can't be right.

[Rossfan]

It will take €s to hire more doctors, nurses, technical and back up people, provide more wards and beds.
But does Paddy want to pay the extra tax to pay for all that?
ROI population in 1996 was 3.5 m now 4.5 m. But no expansion of hospitals to take care of the extra million.

[deiseach]

It will take €s to hire more doctors, nurses, technical and back up people, provide more wards and beds.
But does Paddy want to pay the extra tax to pay for all that?
ROI population in 1996 was 3.5 m now 4.5 m. But no expansion of hospitals to take care of the extra million.

The issue with the health service is not just about funding. The UK spends marginally more of its GDP on health care than Ireland and gets a vastly superior outcome. Yes, it's difficult to cut through the Gordion knot of conflicting interest groups that is the health service in Ireland. But it's an absolute cop-out to say that it is "beyond human capability" or to blame the electorate for an unwillingness to pony up more dough.

[AZOffaly]

It will take €s to hire more doctors, nurses, technical and back up people, provide more wards and beds.
But does Paddy want to pay the extra tax to pay for all that?
ROI population in 1996 was 3.5 m now 4.5 m. But no expansion of hospitals to take care of the extra million.

The issue with the health service is not just about funding. The UK spends marginally more of its GDP on health care than Ireland and gets a vastly superior outcome. Yes, it's difficult to cut through the Gordion knot of conflicting interest groups that is the health service in Ireland. But it's an absolute cop-out to say that it is "beyond human capability" or to blame the electorate for an unwillingness to pony up more dough.

Yes deiseach. Value for money versus just throwing more money at it. The health budget is fairly massive, but the money is being wasted in so many ways.

[Maguire01]

It will take €s to hire more doctors, nurses, technical and back up people, provide more wards and beds.
But does Paddy want to pay the extra tax to pay for all that?
ROI population in 1996 was 3.5 m now 4.5 m. But no expansion of hospitals to take care of the extra million.

The issue with the health service is not just about funding. The UK spends marginally more of its GDP on health care than Ireland and gets a vastly superior outcome. Yes, it's difficult to cut through the Gordion knot of conflicting interest groups that is the health service in Ireland. But it's an absolute cop-out to say that it is "beyond human capability" or to blame the electorate for an unwillingness to pony up more dough.

Economies of scale are surely a factor, no?

[Bingo]

My wife is a nurse in the HSE.

The major changes that she has seen in the HSE over the years is form filling and ever changing "best practice". No matter what is done now the paperwork trail takes more time than the care. Was talk of a work to rule recently and any nurse/doctor interviewed stated that it would improve the service of care as they would actually get to do the job they are there to do.

She says that half the day can be taken up responding to a stream of queries from the bank of administrators that are employed "upstairs" or trying to implement new measures of care or procedures than are been imposed from the latest review of best practice from another team of consultants who waltzed through the wards months back and identified improvements that could be made before waltzing off again to write a thousand page report with fancy graphs and pie carts and earned them a lot of money.

[deiseach]

Economies of scale are surely a factor, no?

Not a big one, I would have thought. If it were, the United States would have the best health service in the developed world.

[armaghniac]

Sinn Pain moaning that the Budget is a return to "Boom and Bust" policies .
Ya couldn't make it up

Fine Gael and Labour use the people's own money to bribe them while doing northing to improve the 3rd world health system. Health gets €18m and the top earners a €180m tax cut. If that's not "Boom and Bust" I don't know what is. Anyone who buys this shite is nothing but peasant with no regard for society or their country.

Everyone is paying less tax, not so much as a case of using people's money to bribe them but of taking less money off the people.

As noted before the health service is often fine, but has some astonishing failings which are  rightly widely publicised. These failures of management reflect failures all the way up to the political system, and SF proposals to cut doctors pay for political reasons is a good example of this. 

It is worth noting that people live longer in the 26 counties than the 6. SF might well either look to the administration of the part of the country where it is in government or else try and achieve a United Ireland; sadly it does neither of these things.

My wife is a nurse in the HSE.

The major changes that she has seen in the HSE over the years is form filling and ever changing "best practice". No matter what is done now the paperwork trail takes more time than the care. Was talk of a work to rule recently and any nurse/doctor interviewed stated that it would improve the service of care as they would actually get to do the job they are there to do.

She says that half the day can be taken up responding to a stream of queries from the bank of administrators that are employed "upstairs" or trying to implement new measures of care or procedures than are been imposed from the latest review of best practice from another team of consultants who waltzed through the wards months back and identified improvements that could be made before waltzing off again to write a thousand page report with fancy graphs and pie carts and earned them a lot of money.

What is needed is root and branch process improvement from the ground up. Every paperwork requirement should be priced in terms of the opportunity cost of the diversion from medical duties. IT could do a lot to speed things up.

One of the reasons I have contempt for Labour and that clown Howlin is that a truly Labour approach to recent hardship would have been to talk to staff and have them identify pointless paperwork and the like, freeing up time to keep the service going. Instead all we have a reports which nobody implements anyhow.

[Rossfan]

. But it's an absolute cop-out to say that it is "beyond human capability" or to blame the electorate for an unwillingness to pony up more dough.

3,000 bedstaken out in 1987 were never restored. Will cost €s to do so.
Martin, Cowen, Harney, Reilly and Varadkar all humans who tried and failed.
Time Leo sent for the expert Mr Deiseach who obviously has the answer

[mikehunt]

Too many pen pushers resulting in too much bureaucracy.  Focus is on admin rather than patient care. Pen pushers trying to justify their positions delaying patient care and eating up resources.  Same across all public sector bodies in ireland except we're dealing with people's lives in rhe HSE. Like everything else in this kip no value for money but its ok folks, Rossfan has a few extra euro in his deep pocket.

[Declan]

Here's how the public broadcaster operates as the official mouthpiece of the government Ireland. Why am I not surprised?

Anyone listening to Today with Sean O'Rourke on RTE radio yesterday may have wondered why Michael Noonan and Brendan Howlin sounded so confident of their answers. Well, the reason, as I can exclusively reveal, is that they knew the questions beforehand, and their civil servants had already worked on the replies.

This is the type of behind-the-scenes information you can discover when you are accidentally ushered into the wrong room and nobody in that room realises you are a journalist. Despite the fact that you are carrying a shorthand notebook, holding a pen aloft and sporting the desperately hopeful expression of a person needing to wring one more story from a budget that has already been leaked, announced and analysed to within an inch of its fiscal life.

I was supposed to be in RTE to write a colour piece, but I ended up in what seemed like an episode of The Thick of It.

Having been guided into a room full of the national broadcaster's staff and Department of Finance officials, I perched myself on an available sofa. I didn't know this area was off-limits for hacks and I didn't know I wasn't meant to be there. The Department of Finance staff must have thought I was with RTE. RTE must have thought I was with the Department of Finance. Nobody asked me to leave and so I stayed.

Then all hell broke loose. One of Mr Noonan's advisors appeared and bore down on one of the producers of the Today programme. With all the charm of an autocrat, he explained that neither the finance minister or the public expenditure minister would so much as breathe on a microphone unless all phone-in questions were made available beforehand.

RTE hesitated diplomatically, but were shut down by the official's insistence.

"No. We're going to be very clear on this, the ministers will not go on air before seeing them first," he demanded.

A producer relented and handed over the questions. Pages were passed between departmental staff and frantic calls were made while political responses were hastily crafted.

One civil servant paced the floor, iPhone to his ear, beseeching whoever was listening for the most appropriate response to a homeless mother forced to live in a Dublin hotel for nearly six months with her nine-year-old daughter.

Shrouded in my own irrelevance, I lasted a good half-hour in the room, taking it all in. Eventually I began to wonder if I was meant to be an audience to this live performance of Yes Minister, and was about to ask, when circumstances intervened.

Another, better-known journalist was also mistakenly ushered into the room and I was rumbled by association. Hence I was shooed upstairs to join the rest of the undesirable fourth estate in a cramped, wood-panelled conference room.

We gathered round a digital radio to hear, via a national broadcast, what was happening 15-odd feet down the hall. For me, it was the listening equivalent of déjà vu.

I was just in time to hear Erica, the homeless woman who had caused so much consternation in the pre-programme preparation, graciously explaining how utterly useless the budget was to her and her nine-year-old daughter.

"A fiver on children's allowance, whoop-de-doo. What am I supposed to do with that? How is that supposed to help the situation? We are homeless. That's €5 I already had, that you took off me a couple of years ago," she said.

"I understood you were in receipt of lone parents allowance . . . " Mr Howlin said, presumably referring to his carefully crafted notes.

"No, I work! I work part-time! I don't get lone parents, so stop saying that," Erica said, deviating outrageously from the script.

Scalded by my earlier insubordination, I obediently waited until the end of the broadcast before attending the government-designated interview opportunity. The ministers were wheeled out for us, unscorched by a tame hour's broadcast. They stayed and fielded four whole questions from the assembled press. In the background, Marty Whelan strode merrily by.

Both the department of the finance and the department of public expenditure declined to comment when asked why questions were demanded prior to the broadcast, and referred The Times to RTE. A spokeswoman for RTE insisted nothing untoward had taken place.

"The department press officers had no input into which calls went on air, or the order in which they were used. Nor were there any issues with the ministers appearing on this morning's programme," she