Carry on blundering - All this fuss over light bulbs?

THE Health Service Executive and its managers are frequently subjected to stern and justified criticism over the shortcomings of our health services.

However, it is difficult not to have sympathy for them in the light-bulb dispute.

Electricians, members of the Technical Engineering and Electrical Union, have been removed from the HSE payroll in a dispute over changing work practices.

One of the central issues, which, if used by Killnaskully scriptwriters would stretch credibility, is who gets to change light bulbs in our hospitals.

Like some eye-popping documentary on the History Channel, one where you have to reassure tittering children that it’s not made up, the Technical Engineering and Electrical Union has rolled back the years to a time of demarcation to die for.

Yesterday doctors in Kerry General Hospital cancelled planned surgery because they felt they could not safely proceed in the absence of emergency electrical support.

Do the electricians think that’s acceptable? Do they think that a person ill in hospital should lie in darkness until someone finds a foreman who, in turn, finds an electrician, and instructs them to change a bulb?

Though there are other issues, the electricians have refused to carry bleeps, answer pagers or mobile phones and to only accept verbal instructions from their direct supervisor.

It is insane that, in 2007, any union might imagine that only their members be allowed change a light bulb. It’s a minor task carried out by tens of thousands of people each and every day. Rocket science it ain’t.

This is the kind of daft union activity — whether carried out by electricians, consultants or pharmacists — that contributes to the chaos in our health system. It is the kind of insanity that wins support for people vehemently opposed to unions and undermines the movement’s capacity to deal with significant issues.

The dispute, simmering away for years, epitomises the situation in our public services where reform is continually challenged and delayed to protect the interests of so many powerful groups. It is easy to be angry with the electricians, but it is worth considering why any group would take such action when they must have realised how unpopular it would be.

Is it another manifestation of the “me too” attitude encouraged by €58,000 pay rises for civil servants? By the rules being rewritten to sort out one politician’s pension? Or by watching government ministers ride out storms of ineptitude and failure?

That is why high standards in high places are still important. After all, example is everything.

In this instance the TEEU workers have given Christmas pantomime writers a fillip they could not have anticipated in the week following Noel Dempsey’s double bill of Carry on Blundering.

Already bookmakers have aimed that most potent of all weapons — derision — at the role of unions in the public service. One has opened a book offering odds on what bizarre set of circumstances might cause the next dispute in the land that time forgot.

After all, it takes a special group of people to make us feel sorry for HSE managers.