It seems that little forensic scrutiny of the HSE’s operational performance under its new CEO has materialised. Anything to emerge to date has a whiff of a brochure-type exposition of style over substance. While Bernard Gloster’s populist ‘social-care’ nuances appear superficially worthy, they conveniently dilute and camouflage the many core chaotic challenges abounding.
Everyone looking on is grimly aware that the HSE requires an absolute root and branch organisational revamp to divest itself of acute internecine malaise, especially in the distorted endemic careerist dynamics prevailing which allows an in-house recruitment farrago to fester ad nauseam.
The upshot of this ensures the perennial ‘merry-go-round’ of people being selected and promoted to lofty middle-management roles (and higher) without the requisite abilities to perform the crucial managerial tasks at hand with appropriate efficiency. Thus, the whole HSE ‘organism’ stagnates and stutters along with no apparent appetite for rescue. Children’s disability services are one glaringly prime example in the current maelstrom of developmental transformation which has already taken over 10 years of so-called planning and ongoing chaotic attempts to implement, arriving only at a place of continuing mayhem and fudge and fidget seem to constitute the twin approach, with ever-recurring quagmires of data gathering in cul-de-sacs masquerading as ‘action’.
Waiting lists are deemed a first rung of ‘treatment’ delivery, and paltry evidence that at least something is being done. The major underlying malignance is that the managerial classes hovering within have little or no practical awareness of clinical realities, and are mostly ‘paper-planners’, ie, if it reads well on paper, then it should work in practice. Sadly the clinical operatives on the frontline then suffer the ignominy of looking inept and inefficient when they can’t deliver the outrageous expectations of the phoney paper trail.
This managerial/clinical interface fault line is the fundamental failure in the whole schema, and needs to be addressed in the first instance by having a twin CEO governance, ie, a manager plus a clinician which befits the actuality of the enterprise. Thus Mr Gloster should have a fellow joint CEO who is a clinical frontline professional by experience. Such a hybrid CEO scenario, would at least have the combined competence to tackle the emerging relentless challenges.
Bernard Gloster has heralded the imminent appointment of six new regional executive officers as per Sláintecare templates. One only has to wonder and weep from which part of the existing HSE hierarchical monolith will they emanate. One thing for sure and very sad is that they will be insiders, who have been well and truly HSE-ised and fully inculcated in traditional HSE-think, thus protracting and propagating the old dynamics of erratic, contradictory and confused delivery.
I know this from many years working in various clinical strands of the healthcare system, and knowing so many clinical therapists and their heads of department who still heroically plough a lonely and debilitating furrow amid the labyrinthe of entropic flux. Soul destroying and sad — so sad.
Jim Cosgrove, Clinical Music Therapist, Lismore, Co Waterford
Restore Ireland’s active neutrality
The many abuses of the UN Security Council veto reached a new low on December 8, 2023. The US vetoed a resolution for a ceasefire in Gaza; Britain abstained on this vote. Both countries are supplying weapons and munitions that contributed to the deaths of more than 17,000 Palestinian people. The virtual genocide occurring in Gaza combined with the killings, war crimes and human rights abuses in Ukraine, Darfur, Congo, the Horn of Africa, Myanmar, and elsewhere, are not just breaches of inadequate international laws, they are gross breaches of basic morality, and present existential threats to all of humanity.
In the past religious beliefs provided moral codes of conduct for most communities even if religious motives were seriously abused at times. The casting aside of religious beliefs means that humanity must fall back on basic self-preservation morality, at the core of which should be ‘thou shalt not kill’.
Thucydides wrote in his Melian Dialogue that: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” That is now happening in the most brutal way in Gaza.
Complying with so-called rules-based international order is cited by Irish and many western governments to justify participation in, or complicity in, wars of aggression and multiple breaches of international laws including the UN Charter. The deaths, trauma and destruction in Gaza are now being added to the deaths, trauma, and destruction in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere, with no accountability or imposed reparations. Ireland’s active neutrality must be restored. The Irish Government must promote UN reform, and the Irish Defence Forces must only participate in genuine UN peacekeeping missions.
Edward Horgan, Castletroy, Limerick
Religion-based war
One of the factors that prolonged conflicts like the 75-year conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis and which was also a significantly factor in prolonging the 28-year-long troubles in Northern Ireland is religion.
Religion acted like a powerful wedge that kept the opposing sides in each of these two conflicts apart much longer than would have been the case in other conflicts.
It is sadly the case that in nearly every country in the world the numbers in most religions are constantly topped up with new born children who are totally unaware of this adult-driven process that can affect greatly the outlook of their future lives. This has, I believe, the not so surprising and unfortunate result of the followers of most religions becoming childlike and unquestioning their religion. It is too often the case that many followers of most religions cannot even begin to ask the very obvious question as to why they had no choice in their religion.
Therefore it would be a good idea if it were universally the case that people were only ever requested to follow a religion when they become adults and with complete freedom. If this right to choose a religion was enshrined in law everywhere then religions might cease its links to particular cultures or to particular political ways of life. If such a right became universal then Protestants living in Northern Ireland, for example, would soon no longer always be identified as belonging automatically to the Unionist tradition. Catholics also who happen to live in either Northern Ireland and in the Irish Republic would no longer find themselves identified as being seekers of a United Ireland.
If too in Israel and Palestine the people living there could choose their own religion completely freely as adults, then the chances of Jewish and Muslims becoming friendly next-door neighbours would surely greatly increase? The chances of Jews and Muslims belonging even to the very same family group would, I believe, also increase greatly with the fruits of a new and successful peace process more likely to happily grow much more in that troubled region?
Sean O’Brien, Kilrush, Co Clare
Warring semantics
While deferring to Gareth O’Callaghan’s point that Bible stories and other mythology are parables carrying general lessons regardless of factual detail, it is still vital to know the translation problems to avoid public embarrassment — ‘No room at the inn’ as history repeats itself (Irish Examiner, December 9). I once bought a Christmas card with minarets in the background of the journey to Bethlehem — six centuries before Islam arrived. The publisher's ignorance confirms that much commerce is more glib social skills than fact. Compare the replacement of the green coat in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with the red-coated Santa of Macy’s.
Ditto the current political substance on a geographical expression that includes both banks of the River Jordan but did not include the Negev desert triangle of the British map. ‘Palestine’ is the Roman and British accent on the Greek ‘Philistine’. The Biblical Hebrew verb is LeFalesh — to intrude, trespass or invade and the noun is Plishtim as Semitic languages interchange P/F. This all makes sense in the books of Samuel but not for moderns posing as longstanding locals with Garibaldi pretensions to be an Enlightenment nation when Islam tolerates it but is not egalitarian with Christians, Jews, and pagans.
In parting, anybody who has seen Philistine pottery would agree Matthew Arnold maligned their quality swirls distinct from the squared rigidities of the Classical and Egyptian traditions.
Frank Adam, Prestwich, England
Shameful actions
During previous wars, citizens could argue that they were unaware of the atrocities which were being committed in their area. But on our own screens we can see today, the faces of children covered with blood, mud, and confusion, as they search in vain for their parents. We can hear the cries of despair of widows as they weep for their dead. Unicef is speaking about “humanity’s darkest hour”.
Shame on any nation that would lower its standards to those of invading bandits and bring about the deaths of more than 10,000 innocent women and children.
Shame on a nation that wages war on a besieged, congested, urban area in pursuit of a military objective. Shame on us if we do not do all in our power to stop such madness and to bring before the Court of International Justice those committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Eamon Fitzpatrick FCA, Strandhill Road, Sligo
