Well-paid consultants to get even more

It not possible to see yesterday’s announcement that hospital consultants will get pay rises of up to €72,000 in any context other than this week’s announcement of record numbers of public patients on waiting lists.

As an agreement was reached yesterday to resolve a pay dispute 511,904 people — one-in-ten of the population — are in a queue to see a specialist. Some 44,029 of these are children, 10,000 of whom have waited longer than a year and a half.