Whose ‘choice’ was our two-tier health system?

HEALTH Minister Mary Harney’s reaction to the regrettable Roscommon cheese-throwing incident makes for very depressing and worrying reading.

She first sought to lecture us by stating that “politics is about choices, it’s about argument and a debate” and then went on to give the impression that she actually believes her privatisation of healthcare policy and the resulting copperfastening of the two-tier discriminatory system that she is creating is part of the ‘mainstream agenda’ by claiming those protesting are “of a different persuasion than the mainstream parties in this country... ”

For more than two years now, as more and more people have come to see through precisely what she is doing, thousands and thousands of people have taken to the streets in protest at her policies, yet she chooses to ignore that and carry on regardless.