Irish Examiner View: Preposterous bureaucracy tying up vaccination programme in red tape

Red tape delays vaccines

A former surgeon but still registered with the Medical Council, being recruited for the vaccination programme, was asked to supply, among many other documents, her birth certificate and Junior Certificate.

One of the constant challenges of our world is trying to find a sensible balance between the red tape so beloved of stickler bureaucrats and efficiency. Maybe balancing the demands of political correctness and commonsense too. This must be done without losing sight of the positive, empowering objectives behind those disciplines. Those objectives are not always achieved and efforts to fight the pandemic have uncovered one as bizarre as it is distressing.

A former surgeon but still registered with the Medical Council was asked to supply, among many other documents, her birth certificate and Junior Certificate results when she applied to become a Covid-19 vaccinator. The recruitment system, inexplicably farmed out by the HSE to a recruitment agency, is so tangled in red tape that it has been extended a fourth time because it is so complex. The system has also been criticised because it does not facilitate those only able to work on a part-time basis.