Doctor defends strike plans

The head of the National Disease Surveillance Centre today defended a plan by doctors to escalate industrial action in their row with the Government.

Dr Darina O’Flanagan spoke out after a weekend of clashes between the Irish Medical Organisation and Health Minister Micheal Martin over the potential for the spread of the deadly Sars virus to Ireland from the Far East.

The public health doctors, who have been on strike over a pay and conditions row early this month, are to announce plans to involve general practitioners and junior doctors in their dispute later this week – despite a charge by the minister they have been guilty of a “total abandonment of responsibility” by staging their stoppage during the on-going alert over Sars.

No instances of the sickness have so far been confirmed in Ireland, but Mr Martin and the Government have come under fire from both medical representatives and opposition politicians for their handling of a number of high-profile suspect cases.

Dr O’Flanagan responded to the minister’s comments today by declaring that the doctors would have been irresponsible to continue operating the existing “unsafe” system.

Dr O’Flanagan, the director of the Disease Surveillance Centre, said her colleagues were taking industrial action in the hope of establishing a structured 24-hour service to deal with infectious diseases – like the Sars virus.

And she welcomed the decision by the Irish Medical Organisation to consider taking industrial action in support of the public health doctors.

The doctors reacted angrily to Mr Martin’s remarks about them, pointing out their members had left the picket lines last week to deal with the Sars suspects.

For his part, the minister asserted that the striking doctors had over-reacted to his intervention.

The Government has yet to respond to calls for a recall of the Dublin parliament from its continuing Easter recess to debate the Sars menace, and opposition politicians today pleaded for new measures aimed at preventing virus reaching Ireland.

Fine Gael party frontbencher Brian Hayes said that preventive measures had to be central to any health strategy dealing with the illness and claimed that the government’s health department had no effective procedures in place to deal with the threat.

He also said the public had lost confidence in the capacity of Mr Martin to handle the threat, and the minister had a duty to restore public confidence in the health service.

Labour health spokeswoman Liz McManus, said it was clear that neither the public nor the medical profession had any confidence in the capacity of the minister to deal with this problem effectively, and branded as “inept and incompetent” the handling of a suspected case involving a Chinese woman who recently arrived in Ireland.

Ms McManus repeated a demand for the direct intervention of Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, in charge of an emergency group to co-ordinate efforts to prevent the spread of Sars.

:: Final results are awaited from tests carried out on two women Sars suspects in Ireland last week, one Chinese and the other Irish.

The tests are expected to prove negative, although there has been criticism of the way both have been dealt with by the authorities.