Social services - Obligations come before privileges

THOUGH our economy has been under siege for just a short while it appears that cracks are beginning to appear in the citadel already.

The Health Service Executive has scrapped plans for an out-of-hours service for troubled children because of spending cuts.

The very welcome plans for social care teams, which would have been on call 24/7 rather than the part-time service available outside Dublin, were designed to intervene at moments of great crisis in a young person’s life. The service was to have been a safety net when all else looked as if it might fail. It was meant to keep possibility alive in a life that might be going off the rails, an intervention to help an endangered individual and their community.

Amazingly, the scheme has been shelved as if tragedy and human crisis ran to a timetable. This is a pity and once again it is the most vulnerable, the weakest, those with the voice most easily ignored, who suffer. It is a sad fact of life that the majority of vulnerable children, those who might be in most need of this service, come from the least-influential sections of our society.

Because of this reality we must ask ourselves a simple question and try to answer it honestly. Would this scheme be dropped if the children most dependent on it came from a more powerful, articulate, organised and politically aware sector of our society?

It is of course an unfortunate that the minister responsible — Barry Andrews — is on holiday and is therefore unable to explain this terribly retrograde step.

There is another sector of society which would not be able to answer that question at all unless you used sign language to ask it. Because of more “cost containment” hundreds of deaf and hard-of-hearing people will have to wait for up to two years to get hearing aids, their essential communications link with the world around them. Another minority takes a hit and becomes isolated because of spending cuts.

These are two of the cuts across government because we are told we cannot afford the services. If there was no more to it than that we’d just have to accept it and get on with our lives.

However, the news that almost 4,000 patients were treated privately under the National Treatment Purchase Fund last year by the same consultant they had been assigned on public waiting lists and that, in some cases, consultants were paid twice for treating the same patient is enough to make the blood boil. These consultants were paid twice by the HSE, the very organisation that is axing schemes for children and deaf people.

No matter what the consultants will say this stinks to high heaven and appears to be the kind of practice that makes us all very wary of the privatisation of health.

Over recent years we have come to imagine that some of the trappings of affluence are core social activities that must be supported by the State. It is time to divide government spending into two categories: that which sustains life and that which enhances it.

It seems immoral that the State is funding all sorts of non-essential ventures while, at the same time, cutting schemes designed to help the most vulnerable.

Maybe this recession will give us an opportunity for some real social stocktaking and force us to choose between obligations and privileges. About time too.