Not the best medicine

The Fianna Fáil/PD government's plan to supposedly reform the South's health service includes the abolition of health boards, slimming down the Department of Health and the creation of a Hospitals Agency.

This is not real reform. It doesn't end the two-tier public-private system that creates virtual apartheid in our health services.

While new bureaucratic structures are being set up, public patients will continue to suffer and die on waiting lists, hospital beds will remain closed and 200,000 people will be left without the medical card cover promised before the last General Election. The Fianna Fáil commitment to end hospital waiting lists within two years is now history.

Elected representatives on health boards had a very minor role but they could at least scrutinise the delivery of health services on behalf of ordinary citizens. That role of accountability is now going. The planned centralisation is especially bad for areas outside the large urban centres.

The proposed creation of a National Health Services Executive is an exercise in political expediency. The government wants to shift responsibility from the Minister for Health and Children to such an Executive, which would not be directly answerable to the Dáil for its decisions.

Why have consultants' contracts not been renegotiated? This was supposed to be delivered by end of last year, but as of yet there has been no sign that this government wants to challenge the unaccountable power wielded by the consultants' representative bodies.

The government has had six years to come up with health service reform. If this is the best they can do after all that time, then the problems of our health services are set to worsen in the time ahead.

Special welcome for Olympics

This Saturday sees the opening ceremony of the Special Olympics in Dublin, when athletes from around the world will finally see years of training come to fruition. Nelson Mandela and Mohammed Ali will do the formal honours, while thousands of volunteers and host communities across the country are making sure that the experience will be a positive one for all those taking part.

However, disability groups have been criticising the government for engaging in 'hypocrisy Olympics'. Cuts in funding to special needs schools and training facilities, as well as a plethora of other let-downs, mean that when the Games are over, Irish disabled people will be left feeling like they haven't been out of the starting blocks.