Public left fuming as health service loses out to Farmleigh

AS we head into a new year, we should ponder on the lesson learned in Leopardstown during the week. Rising to the occasion is all very well, once there is an occasion to rise to.

The presumption that we have achieved something can prove unfounded, as the unfortunate jockey Roger Loughran discovered to his cost on Central House, the second favourite at the world-famous racecourse on Tuesday.

As a non-betting man - apart from sticking a pin in the list of Grand National runners - the futility of gambling was reaffirmed for me by Loughran’s plight at the end of the €70,000 Paddy Power Dial-A-Bet Chase.

It also pointed to the problems that presumption can bring in its wake.

I would not be so sanguine about the misfortune of the jockey had I had money riding on the horse, like the man I met the following day. He failed to see the funny side of the episode, as evidenced by the tortured look on his face at the memory of the incident.

As the world and his wife knows at this stage, the 25-year-old jockey from Co Meath had the race sewn up and the opposition beaten just a hundred yards from the winning post. But at that stage, inexplicably, he went astray. (Many of us do, only not as spectacularly). In front of 20,445 dumb-struck people at Leopardstown, not to mind the millions watching on television, Roger Loughran made his grandstanding winning gesture.

Only it was premature, something most men can identify with. Like a mirage, he saw a finishing line where none existed.

The 11/4 second favourite came in third in a victory turned to defeat in one of the most bizarre episodes the track has witnessed.

I can’t see the management at Leopardstown taking any measures to assist newly professional jockeys with cautionary signs along the course flashing the message: Finishing line 100 yards away... 50 yards away... 20 yards away.

Instead of making a dramatic entrance to his new career, Roger Loughran was instead handed a 14-day suspension by the stewards.

Dramatic though it was - especially for the punters who had money riding on the horse - it pales into insignificance when one considers what’s happening in the health service, which we all have money on.

Last year over 20,000 operations were cancelled in 30 hospitals, the primary cause being a shortage of beds.

Apart from those operations cancelled by patients, the causes include equipment breaking down; staff being away; nurse shortages; no anaesthetic cover available, and theatres being overbooked.

Now it looks like Tánaiste and Health Minister Mary Harney, who petulantly demanded the health portfolio in the Cabinet re-shuffle, is going into a head-to-head with the country’s hospital consultants.

She stubbornly insists she will go ahead with a new contract with or without the support of the consultants - who maintain they have not even seen a draft contract.

IT seems ridiculous that the minister intends to push ahead with a two-tier consultant system that would see public and private consultants working together.

There should, of course, be equity in our health system - if we lived in an ideal world. But our health service is far from being ideal, even though it’s costing more than e11 billion a year.

The Irish Patients’ Association is right in saying that access to health should not be based on whether a person has health insurance or not. But try getting access without insurance and it would soon become apparent that that’s not how our system works.

Given that we have a less than adequate health service, it seems an extravagance to spend millions of taxpayers’ money on turning a house in the grounds of Farmleigh estate into a residence for future taoisigh.

Farmleigh has already cost us about €25m, the inside of which will never be seen by the vast majority of those who bought it on behalf of the State.

Now, the Office of Public Works (OPW) has confirmed that the Steward’s House there will be refurbished over the course of next year to provide a residence for the Taoiseach (although a spokesman for Bertie Ahern said he would never use it).

The Health Service Executive (HSE) in a rather understated reaction declared the cancellation of more than 20,000 operations to be “unacceptable.” It’s considerably more than that - it’s scandalous, especially given that a shortage of hospital beds was the main contributing factor. According to Pat McLoughlin, director of the HSE’s national hospitals office, officials were discussing the problem with some of the country’s busiest hospitals to see how to address it.

A solution seems to be glaringly obvious, especially one aspect of it. Provide sufficient hospital beds - something that Mary Harney promised to address with some class of a plan months ago.

Not that the information was put into the public domain voluntarily. It had to be ferreted out through the Freedom of Information Act from individual hospitals.

To solve the debacle that is the multi-billion health service, the Government should take a leaf from the book of Britain's Conservative party, and get advice from somebody like plain-speaking Bob Geldof.

Despite the fact that Tory leader David Cameron did the very sensible thing and managed to get Geldof on to his party policy group on global poverty, the Dubliner still intends to work with Tony Blair and his government.

Bob Geldof’s credentials are impeccable and undoubtedly he will tell the Conservatives that their policies are “rubbish,” as he promised to do.

“I’ll shake hands with the devil on my left and the devil on my right to get to where we need to be,” he declared.

In this country there’s no shortage of devils, what we need are the type that gets things done. What we need is someone to tell Mary Harney that some of her policies, or lack of them, are rubbish, not merely that the rubbish tip needs to be re-organised.

The 20,400 cancelled operations make us look like a banana republic, and not the invention that John O’Donoghue, Minister for Arts and Sport, came out with during the week about Sinn Féin and an imaginary retained army.

In a year that saw some of the worst excesses of Government waste of taxpayers’ money on extravagant and useless projects, one would wish our ministers would hark back to the mindset that prevailed in the Seventies.

Files released under the 30-year rule reveal that in 1975 the Department of Finance queried an entertainment bill for £69.73, half of the bill being for drink. Maybe the spending of that sum of money was queried only because it was spent on entertaining journalists!