Another victim of the Mad Molecule Theory?

Off to Paris at end of next week with the ball & chain, partly to mark our 21st wedding anniversary. You’d serve a shorter sentence for mass murder - at least that what she claims.

This will entail a lot of walking, central Paris is deceptively large, so last Saturday I bought a new pair of walking shoes in anticipation. They felt fine strolling around inside the shoe shop, but the left shoe began to rub the back of my heel when I went for a real walk. So I adopted the classic strategy - put a band-aid on the part of the foot that’s rubbing and set about breaking in the shoes properly. Three or four 40-minute walking sessions later, the problem is solved and the offending shoe has been broken in.

But then I started wondering was it my foot that had been broken in and the shoe remained unaltered. Or was it a bit of both?

Inevitably this led to consideration of whether, through some strange form of osmosis, the outcome was a practical proof of Flann O'Brien's mad molecule theory, with my shoe now being part human heel and my heel being part shoe. And where are the molecules of the protective band-aid in the mix?

Note to self: wear a different pair of shoes tomorrow. And no band-aid.

Have you nothing smaller?

One service provided by Bank of Ireland constantly annoys me. When you use one of their ATMs it will always make up your withdrawal in the minimum number of notes possible - in other words, in the largest denominations possible. Thus, if you withdraw €200, you’ll get 4 x €50 notes. Not popular when you proffer one to pay €1.60 for a newspaper.

My brother works for that bank and, a couple of months ago, I told him of my irritation, contrasting it with experience in France where a similar €200 withdrawal would typically include some €20 & €10 notes.

Imagine my horror when he confessed that he is the cash management guru who devised and implemented this cash dispenser strategy. I gave him a piece of my mind about how customer-unfocused this strategy is. I could see from his reaction that he had no idea what I was talking about.

Now I’ve discovered that, at the end of March 2007, my brother addressed a European banking conference in London on this very topic, described as follows: “Optimising cash management at ATMs The replenishment of ATMs, and the cost of cash inside each machine, are two of the largest components of deployers’ overall costs. To what extent can cash management software improve operational efficiency?”
I haven’t ruled out fratricide if I find that continental banks start to follow his benighted example.

From stable to betting exchange

Jim Bolger’s Teofilo has been the short-priced ante-post favourite for the Newmarket 2000 Guineas for several months. Typically available at 5/4, his odds on Betfair betting exchange suddenly shot out to 10/1 for a short time yesterday. This was despite telephone confirmation yesterday morning to the Racing Post by Jim Bolger that the horse was fit and well and all systems were go for next month’s first colt’s classic of the season.

Most bookies immediately suspended betting on the Guineas, pending clarification from the stable as to the horse’s well-being.

Later in the day is was confirmed that the horse had suffered a slight setback. Jim Bolger issued a statement in the afternoon which said that "Teofilo has had a training setback. When trotted yesterday afternoon he showed slight discomfort. "As a result, his training will be restricted to walking and swimming for one week. Otherwise, he is fit and well and on target for his 2,000 Guineas tilt on May 5.”
It just shows you how quickly sensitive information gets from the stable to the betting exchanges.

Most bookies have now restored Teofilo to race favouritism, slightly lengthening his odds to between 6/4 & 2/1.

Hopefully someone snapped up that 10/1 on Betfair and will make a killing on race day. ’Cos I’ve backed Teofilo @ 16/1 for the Guineas - great odds but worth nothing if he doesn’t run.

The cost of Health

On RTE’s Morning Ireland today it was pointed out that the basic salary in the proposed new consultant contract, reported to be €205,000 plus up to 20% performance-related annual bonus, is 50% higher than the basic salary for consultants in the UK NHS, a figure that was not disputed by the IHCA representative.

However, later this morning the talks between HSE and the IHCA have broken down, with the IHCA reported by RTE as describing the contract and money of offer as “Mickey Mouse”.

Some weeks ago, RTE’s Fergal Bowers, an authoritative source on medical industrial relations, opined that existing consultants would be looking for a salary of nearer to €400k in order to agree the pay element of a new contract. The IHCA response today suggests that Mr Bowers is probably not too far off the mark.

The justification offered by spokesmen for the medical organisations for such very high salary levels, relative to UK peers, is that we want to attract and retain the best possible medical practitioners.

Are we, the ultimate paymasters of the consultants, expected to believe that the Irish consultants are superior in quality to their British counterparts? There might be 5% - 10% who genuinely are, but the vast majority will be no better or no worse than the average in UK or any other European health service.

The IHCA and the IMO are now undertaking a proactive campaign to discourage doctors in Ireland and abroad from applying for any of the new consultant posts, due to be advertised later this week.

Such activity should be classified as industrial action by these organisations on behalf of their members. Any refusal by existing consultants to cooperate with the new recruits should be used treated as a breach of existing contract and used as grounds for dismissal.

The reality is that we should be better off if we could shed the existing expensive consultants and replace them with a new, more flexible and affordable workforce.

Think of it this way: Every €10m in annual salary cost probably gets you 25 existing consultants but would pay for 50 new ones. The system will lose some experience and expertise in shedding the existing lot, leading to some sub-optimal outcomes from patients who are currently at the top of the queue. However, doubling the number of consultants, for the same money, means that the outcomes for a huge number of patients further down the queue will be significantly better.

Put simply, we could afford to employ many more consultants and the resulting reduction in waiting times means that patients will be seen much sooner and this early intervention must greatly increase the prospects for those currently waiting months or years to see a consultant. Naturally, this would have to be done as part of a much wider reform of the hospital service.

Footnote: Aired on RTE's Today with Pat Kenny show 18th April.

Those benefits of EBS mutuality

Although not a shareholder, I’ve been watching the EBS boardroom battle with a little added interest, as I worked for a couple of years with Ted McGovern, EBS Chief Executive, during his time with Bank of Ireland.

One item on Eithne Tinney’s protest agenda is Ted’s very generous remuneration and pension package. This aspect amused me because I always felt that Ted had something in common with Oscar Wilde: two men of simple taste - they only like the best. That’s an expensive habit, best if you can find someone else to fund it.

Press reports of the prolonged and contentious EGM, at which Tinney narrowly lost her bid to retain her board seat, include an attack from the floor on Senator Shane Ross, who has been orchestrating a “save Tinney” campaign, by one Mary Caffrey. She accurately described Senator Ross as “a self-serving, publicity-seeking individual, both as a journalist and a politician".

While the press reports correctly identify Mary as Ted McGovern’s wife, it’s not clear that this was revealed to the assembled members when she made her attack on Ross.

Expect to hear as little as possible from EBS for an extended period. Ted will batten down the hatches and wait for the storm to pass. Don’t expect any resignations, justifications or contrition.

Mother & Child rights

Aine Lawlor has been filling Marian Finucane’s RTE Radio 1 chair for the past two Saturdays. Last Saturday, one of the topics under discussion was the Natalie Evans/Howard Johnston case regarding the use of frozen embryos, recently decided by the European Court of Human Rights in favour of Mr Johnston’s request that the embryos be destroyed rather than implanted in Ms Evans.

In the course of the discussion Aine Lawlor made what seemed like an impassioned plea on behalf of Ms Evans. She talked of the natural yearning for a child of women in their mid-30s whose biological clock is ticking but who haven’t found any Mr Right as a long-term partner. Surely these women could be allowed to “adopt” those frozen embryos and give birth themselves?

Then, in yesterday’s Sunday Times, Brenda Power argued that the court decision is tantamount to allowing a man insist on an abortion where he has changed his mind about becoming a father. She clearly believes that Johnston should not have the right to prevent the implantation of the embryos by Ms Evans, allowing her the chance to become a single parent.

The case of Ms Evans is a particularly tough one, as she has made sterile by radiation treatment for cancer and will be unable to reproduce with another partner at a later stage.

However, in the whole media debate on this, I haven’t heard anyone question the automatic right of single women to bring children into the world without any sign of a long-term partner as father for the child. The assumption is that this is an unquestionable “woman’s right to choose”. What about the rights of the child?

The Government proposes to amend the constitution to specifically express the rights of the child. How will these rights intersect with “a woman’s right to choose” to have a baby in any circumstances that suit herself? In these politically times, who will represent the rights of the child in such debates?

Remember, remember

The current radio ad for Alzheimer’s Tea Day begins with the instruction to “Remember…”.

How appropriate. What was that about again?

Bertiegate revisited

The Sunday Independent is running a story this morning which claims that, in 1994, then Finance Minister Bertie Ahern carried a briefcase full of cash on a flight to the UK. The cash had been withdrawn from a Dublin bank the previous day by Celia larkin. The source of the story is supposedly a retired garda Martin Farrell who was Ahern’s driver in 1994. It’s claimed that he first approached Fine Gael’s Jim Higgins and Enda kenny in 2000, and subsequently repeated the accusations in a phone conversation with Higgins which was also heard by Jody Corcoran of the Sindo.

Higgins reported the conversations to the then Flood Tribunal but retired garda Fallon is refusing to make any statement to the Planning Tribunal.

This “exclusive” has all the hallmarks of a belated attempt by Fine Gael to sink Bertie in a sea of sleaze in the weeks before the election, having failed to nail him late last year over his loan/gift dig-out from a group of friends.

However, if the Criminal Assets Bureau was investigating this matter, they would have a hard time believing that the Minister for Finance operated on a cash basis for several years in the early 1990s and had no bank account of any sort at that time. Indeed, they would recognise this as possibly being a clever way of removing any risk of creating a money trail which might subsequently be used to expose corrupt payments and their source. In The Sopranos, Tony Soprano routinely kept large quantities of cash concealed in his garden compost container.

I don’t know what Bertie may or may not have been up to, but I personally don’t believe that the money he acknowledges receiving in mid 1990s was anything other than a gift. Eleven years later to categorise it as a series of small loans defies belief, but was an essential fig-leaf to explain why no tax had been paid on the gift. Indeed, Bertie’s PR people talked of his attitude that these were debts of honour which he had always wanted to repay.

This reminded me of Charlie Haughey under interrogation at the tribunal regarding his unpaid bad debt with AIB. He categorised it as a debt of honour but was challenged by the tribunal’s counsel as to why, in that case, he hadn’t paid it off after all these years. “I haven’t dishonoured it” retorted Haughey.

Clearly Fianna Failers take a Chinese view of appropriate timeframes.

Marketing in action

An exclusive photo from my bathroom. Spot the apparent contradiction on the Dove deodorant. Another marketing genius at work.

The Shinners fight back

In response to my letter proposing that Sinn Féin Mps should now take their seats in Westminster (see blog of 6th April), the following Sinn Féin response is published today in the Irish Examiner, under the heading Foreign parliament? No thanks

ON the off-chance that Peter Molloy was actually trying to make a serious argument (Irish Examiner letters, April 11), I would like to point out the following: Sinn Féin has agreed to enter a power-sharing government with unionists and others in order to deliver equal representation for Irish people in an Irish parliament. It has no desire or need to sit in a foreign imperialist parliament that goes to war at the drop of a hat, and which has never served the interests of the Irish people.

As abstentionist MPs from Westminster, Sinn Féin representatives have served their constituents well. Both the nationalist electorate and the failed SDLP candidates who desire the grandeur of Westminster are testimony to this. While Sinn Féin would never take its lead from what Mr de Valera did or did not do in the past, Mr Molloy should be aware that Dev’s hollow oath was taken as a means to take his party into an Irish parliament to serve Irish people, albeit a parliament that represented only part of the nation.

Far from Sinn Féin sitting in a foreign parliament which caused centuries of pain, destruction and division in Ireland, it is about to serve in the two existing Irish assemblies. From there, it will work to establish one true Irish parliament, which will serve all the people on this island equally. If Mr Molloy really wants to make a link between de Valera’s past and Sinn Féin today, then he should consider this: the one seat Dev could not capture in the past — West Belfast — is now a Sinn Féin stronghold. Mr Molloy can rest assured that Sinn Féin will succeed where Dev failed, when he abandoned the outstanding national issue in the past.

Finally, as a well-meaning gesture to Mr Paisley and unionism in general, is Mr Molloy prepared to ask his local TD to switch allegiance to the House of Commons as an act of good faith?

Cllr Kieran McCarthy, Sinn Féin, 89 Russell Heights, Cobh, Co Cork

My response, emailed today to the Examiner.

Sinn Fein Cllr Kieran McCarthy (Examiner Letters 14th April) dismisses my proposal that his party should take up their seats at Westminster. He asserts that Sinn Fein “has no desire or need to sit in a foreign imperialist parliament” and that “as abstentionist MPs from Westminster, Sinn Féin representatives have served their constituents well”. It seems that the “no surrender” mentality is alive and well in Cobh.

The Good Friday Agreement, democratically endorsed by the populations of both parts of this island, settled the constitutional status of Northern Ireland: it will remain part of the United Kingdom unless and until a majority of the people there vote to change that status. How then could Westminster be legitimately be described as a “foreign parliament” by elected Northern Ireland MPs? As for abstentionist Sinn Fein MPs serving their constituents well, how exactly are they serving their unionist constituents?

Representation is an essential ingredient of any democracy and elected representatives are supposed to serve all their constituents, not just the ones who voted for them. This is particularly important in the single-seat, first-past-the-post Westminster system. How are the interests of Northern Ireland farmers, business, fisheries etc represented by abstentionist MPs? In the Republic, we see how active are the lobby groups representing such interests when key ministerial decisions are being made in Brussels.

Cllr McCarthy asks if, as a well-meaning gesture to Mr Paisley and unionism in general, I’d be prepared to ask my local TD to switch allegiance to the House of Commons as an act of good faith? Happily, in the case of the 3 sitting Government TDs.

However, the proposal to grant Dail Eireann speaking rights to elected Northern Ireland MPs should not even be under consideration for MPs who refuse to exercise their speaking rights, on behalf of all their constituents, in the Parliament to which they have actually been elected.

Footnote: My respone published by the Irish Examiner 19th April.

What's sauce for the honkey...

Phone-in radio is the cheapest and lowest form of entertainment and one which demonstrates an absence of broadcasting imagination. If I had the power I’d close down RTE’s Liveline and ban the phone-in, other than for gardening queries. In the USA this format had created a number of so-called shock-jocks who get cranks and bigots calling in on all sorts of dodgy and sensitive topics.

One currently in the news, and I’d never heard of him until now, is Don Imus, whose CBS radio show is syndicated across the USA. His show is a major revenue generator for CBS and Imus himself earns about $10 million a year, according to the New York Times. He has recently signed a five-year contract extension.

Last week, watching a women’s college basketball game on TV, Imus referred to Rutgers University coloured players as "nappy-headed hos", a racial reference to whores.
Leading members of the black community including Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev Jesse Jackson have demanded that Imus be fired by CBS. "The comments of Don Imus were divisive, hurtful and offensive to Americans of all backgrounds," said presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama who recently promoted his book on Imus's show.

So far, CBS has resisted those demands for dismissal, but they have suspended the Imus show for two weeks.

I’d be happy if they fired Imus and any other shock-jocks out there stirring up rednecks, bigots and cranks. However, I’d be more impressed by black community leadership - Sharpton, Jackson, Obama & Co - if they were also calling for the dismissal of radio & TV executives and DJs who routinely play black gangsta rap which is dominated by the language of violence and misogyny e.g. women are routinely referred to as “bitches” and “hos”. What’s sauce for the honkey……

Time for Sinn Féin MPs to take their seats

Today is Good Friday and it’s exactly nine years, ecclesiastically speaking, since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement on 10th April 1998, a process that was boycotted by the DUP and Ian Paisley was heckled by loyalists at Stormont after the agreement was signed.

Who, then, would have envisaged a situation where the DUP would emerge as the leading Unionist party, where Ian Paisley would be First Minister-designate or, most spectacularly, he would be having last Wednesday's very publicly cordial meeting the Taoiseach at Farmleigh and delivering that extraordinary statement?

If the nationalist community in the North, and we in the South, needed a confidence-building measure from the DUP then surely Ian Paisley's visit last Wednesday was it in spades.
Let's hope that Gregory Campbell and Nigel Dodds start singing from the same hymn sheet as their party leader.

Much of the long delay in implementing the Good Friday agreement has been caused by the tactics of Sinn Fein and the IRA who sought to avoid meeting key obligations at every turn. They have been forced, slowly but surely, to decommission IRA weapons and latterly to recognise the legitimacy of the PSNI.

Republicans abandoned the armed struggle, not because of moral considerations or a dawning abhorrence of violence and murder. Rather it was a pragmatic decision taken after calm and measured analysis which convinced them that they were more likely to achieve their ultimate goal of a united Ireland through political rather than military means, and that the armed struggle was now retarding their advancement on the political front.

The problem with such pragmatism is that in five, ten or 20 years time, should this analysis become discredited, there is no "moral" barrier to prevent republicans taking another pragmatic decision to return to the bomb and bullet.

Sinn Fein must take another confidence-building step to reassure the unionist community of their bona fides as committed democrats. Elected Sinn Fein MPs must take their seats in the House of Commons and represent all their constituents properly. Currently, unionists electors in Sinn Fein seats have been deprived of their constitutional rights to representation in Parliament by this ongoing Sinn Fein boycott.

If de Valera could take the oath of allegiance, then so can Messrs Adams and Co. It will certainly expose Sinn Fein to some abuse from both sides of the political divide in Northern Ireland. That is a price Mr Paisley has clearly been willing to pay.

Footnote: The section in italics published as a letter in the Irish Independent. & the Irish Examiner.

Is it me?

What a laugh to hear that 6 Govt ministers were stuck in a lift at Government Buildings for about 40 minutes yesterday. Those involved were Mary Harney, Mary Coughlan, Mary Hanafin, Brian Cowan, Noel Dempsey and Dermot Ahern.

Messrs Hanafin, Dempsey and Ahern are all fairly slim, Mary Coughlan is fairly large and Mary Harney and Biffo Cowan could both be described as Heavyweights - perhaps even qualifying for the super-heavyweight division.

Being overweight (ok, fat) myself and having been caught in lift situations - either it refuses to leave the level you boarded at or gets stuck between floors - I know what goes through the mind of the heavier occupants in those circumstances. A sneaky look at the wall plate, installed in every lift, which details the maximum occupancy - expressed both in number of people and total weight e.g. 12 people, 1,000 Kg.

You then do a quick, silent count of the number of bodies with you in the lift and whether they look light, average or heavy. Then your mind forms the question that you don’t want to consider: “is it me?”

Poor Mary Harney must have had an embarrassing time in that lift yesterday. For she certainly wasn’t the only one in there wondering if it was her.

What's a "work to rule" in 21st century?

Madam, - So the INO thinks that refusing to take patient-related phone calls or input patient information into a computer system constitutes a "work to rule"? What century is the INO living in? The union appears to be working on the assumption that the public purse is bottomless, that the politicians will buckle with the election looming and that patients make excellent hostages.

Nurses certainly have a right to refuse to work overtime, but the HSE should make it clear to the INO that the current actions go well beyond a "work to rule" and that salary penalties may be applied to staff who refuse to carry out normal daily activities. Any patient deaths which result from the current "work to rule" should be the subject of proceedings for criminal negligence. - Yours, etc,

Footnote: Published as a letter in the Irish Times.

Boston, Berlin or Paris?

Is the Government sending a signal to the nursing organisations that, if they take their claim through bench-marking, a “nod & wink” way will be found to finesse it through the process? “You’ll get your money but we have to be seen to do it through agreed channels”.

This must not be allowed to happen. Bench-marking has already proved to be an expensive waste of public money, with large salary increases paid out for little, if any, reform of public services or added value for money delivered to the public. It is now widely accepted that the public service is overpaid, relative to those working in equivalent private employments. Those public service salary and pension commitments will be a severe financial burden on the state whenever the economy suffers a downturn.

Former PD leader Mary Harney suggested we should adopt the Boston rather than the Berlin economic model? Instead, on her coalition watch, we seem to have ended up with some of the most expensive parts of the Paris model. There the “fonctionnaires”, the public sector employees, really do rule the roost. Their large numbers, relatively high salaries, short working weeks, long holidays, early retirement options and generous pensions are bankrupting France. That country will also need to implement a bench-marking process, but this one will inevitably mean painful cutbacks in public sector conditions of employment.

We need to stop bench-marking being simply a gravy train before further damage is done here. Doubtless there are groups within the nursing population who merit salary increases or allowances above the norm, but there should be no blanket settlement simply to buy industrial peace, or allay the fears of nervous Government TDs in the run-up to the election.

Footnote: Aired on RTE's Today with Pat Kenny programme (minus the french paragraph). Published as a a letter by the Irish Examiner & the Irish Independent. A variant, which included politicians as recipients of bench-marking but left out specific reference to the nurses dispute, published by the Irish Times.

What's Ireland in french?

Irish Times correspondent Lara Marlowe was recently the guest of Eamon Dunphy on his Saturday morning radio show.

When he asked her how Ireland was viewed by the French, she provided the wonderfully apt and descriptive response: “capitalisme sauvage”.

It's time to face down the nurses.

Nurses are routinely portrayed as angels by the media. No politician or media commentator has dared to seriously question their “caring” status or their entitlement to greater rewards.
But is it becoming clearer by the day that they are just as intent on screwing as much as possible for themselves out of the public purse as any other group in the country.

The current row with the Cork midwives is a case in point - despite denials from Liam Doran and the INO, it’s clear that a sweetener of between €3k - €5k was expected by the personnel involved. The nurses wider claim for a 10% increase and a reduction in working hours from 38 to 35 hours per week is justified solely on the basis of relativity with hospital administrators.
Both elements have huge implications for the cost of the Health Service e.g. would the lost hours be made up through overtime or extra staff?

It’s easy to see the interminable cost spiral which such relativity claims are likely to create, if acceded to.

One can at least understand some of the motivation behind the nurses claim: it’s human nature - they’re working daily cheek by jowl with overpaid doctors and consultants, who are all either current or future millionaires. It’s natural that they should also want to get more of the gravy.

The A&E situation is the best propaganda weapon available to the nurses and one that Liam Doran and the INO ruthlessly exploits to their advantage. What percentage of the total nursing population actually works in A&E Departments? Would it be more than 2-3%? But the rest of them can piggyback their pay and working hours claims on the highly publicised stress and working conditions of that minority.

Yet we constantly hear stories of filthy wards and toilets, absence of personal hygiene by nurses moving from patient to patient etc etc.. Many tasks which were traditionally carried out by nurses are now considered to be beneath them - “someone else’s job” - and the consequences for patient care include the spread of MRSA and other hospital infections.

The paradox is that the more we pay these medical staff, the less of them we can afford to employ. We cannot continue to simply pour more money into a dysfunctional health system when all we seem to achieve is enhanced salaries rather than enhanced services.

Tallaght Strategy needed for Health

PARTIES MUST GET TOGETHER OVER HEALTH

There are two essential requirements for a high-quality, value for money Health Service: political agreement on a clearly defined, long-term strategy and operational competence in implementing that strategy. While ongoing political oversight will be required, there should be no political interference in day-to-day operational decisions.

Current political uncertainty about long-term Health Strategy and the role and authority of the HSE can only serve to undermine efforts to resolve existing disputes and reform the overall structures, in order to deliver a better service and extract more value for money from the system.

Could the main parties agree a "Tallaght Strategy" approach for Health? While this would require a squaring of the ideological circles between the main parties in order to agree an overarching long-term strategy, our political leaders need to acknowledge that almost any compromise strategy, implemented effectively, would probably deliver more value for money and better public service than the existing chaotic system.

With only two months to go to the general election, the alternative coalition is threatening, if elected, to overturn a key element of the current Government‘s strategy - the co-location of Public and Private hospitals on existing public sites. From its inception, the HSE has been plagued by ongoing political interference in key operational matters e.g. the Government obliged the HSE to retain all the existing staff of the 11 health boards instead of achieving significant economies through the amalgamation. The HSE is charged with negotiation of new contracts with the consultants, but it is very clear that the cabinet is still calling the shots.

In parallel, the vested interests will continue to exploit the confusion in order to pursue their own narrow interests and extract the maximum amount of money from the seemingly bottomless public purse.

Any downturn in the economy will leave the rest of us with the heavy burden of an overstaffed, overpaid, under-delivering public service - further limiting the funds available for the health service in future.

In the national interest, we urgently need a coherent long-term health strategy which enjoys cross-party support.

Footnote: Published today as a a letter in the Irish Independent.

The Actor plays shy

This morning’s guest on Eamon Dunphy’s couch is Stephen Rea, the Belfast actor who’s currently appearing in “Kicking a Dead Horse” by Sam Shepard at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin (to mixed reviews).

As usual, Dunphy is obsequious to a fault and greets his guest with “I know you don’t like doing interviews” and expresses his fawning thanks to his microphone shy guest.

This would be the same reluctant interviewee who I spotted while channel-hopping last night - he was on Podge & Rodge - hardly the perfect spot for the shy guest. I also recall an long interview on some other RTE radio programme during the week where he talked at length about his acting background and involvement with Brian Friel and the Field Day theatre company.

Reluctant interviewee, my arse.

A new Golden Age for Irish football?

It is just possible that “Stan” Staunton may turn out to be the most successful Irish football manager ever. I base this assessment on the strength of Eamon Dunphy’s condemnation of the man’s management capabilities.

Jack Charlton was previously the object of most contempt from our football pundit, but was also our most successful manager ever, getting us to two World Cup Finals (Italy 1990 & USA 1994) and one European Final (Germany 1988). Next in line for Dunphy’s vitriol was Mick McCarthy, who got us to the 2002 World Cup Finals in Japan/Korea.

Now Staunton is most definitely in the firing line, with Dunphy admitting that he’d hoped Ireland would lose to Wales so that the manager would be fired. If history repeats itself, we might be at the start of a golden era for Irish football.

Footnote: Published as a letter in the Irish Independent.

Another New Dawn in NI

A lot of “historic” hype in the media coverage of yesterday’s agreement between the DUP and Sinn Fein. It reminded me of the day the Good Friday Agreement was finally signed, after days & nights of “will they, won’t they? “ coverage. That was 9 years ago and I had tears in my eyes back then, but not this time around.

Let’s wait and see what happens in May - I hope the assembly gets up and running, but there’s no guarantee that DUP and Sinn Fein can actually work constructively together. My reservations were strengthened by the appearance of Gregory Campbell, DUP MP & MLA, on RTE’s Questions & Answers last night, a special edition broadcast from Belfast.

Campbell was quick to make the point that Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Hain, must be busy wiping the egg from his face after the DUP had shown him that he wouldn’t impose deadlines on them. Thankfully, John Bowman firmly pointed out to Campbell that the deferral of devolution had only been accepted by the British Government on the basis that the DUP had been forced to negotiate this deal, very publicly, with their arch-enemies Sinn Fein.

Campbell is from the anti-power sharing wing of the DUP and is tipped for ministerial office, along with Nigel Dodds, as Paisley seeks to maintain unity within his party. However, Campbell’s contribution last night is typical of the long-standing DUP approach to politics: it is not sufficient to defeat your opponent, you must also seek to humiliate him publicly as well.

Does this augur well for the type of working relationships necessary to make a devolved NI government successful? I don’t think so.

Shane Ross and Sir Anthony

Another set of annual results from Independent News & Media gets the usual fawning coverage from Shane Ross in today‘s Sunday independent.

Ross likes to portray himself as the scourge of the business community but is routinely the brown-nosed boy when it comes to the interests of Sir Anthony.

In today’s article, Ross lauds the performance of the group’s media interests in South Africa, Australasia and India and tells readers that “this is not vanity expansion”.

However, he makes no mention of the company’s UK interests where the London Independent continues to lose millions each year. Now that’s what you could classify as a “vanity expansion”, unless shareholders consider it a fair price to pay for a knighthood.

Put a Cork in it

What is it about Cork people that makes many of them believe the rest of the country is envious of them when, in fact, the feeling is more often one of genuine dislike? And with good cause.

When then Minister for Transport Seamus Brennan promised that Cork Airport would be granted independence from Dublin on a debt-free basis, the local cute hoors decided to pull a fast one. Thinking they had been handed a blank cheque, they went ahead and built a Taj Mahal of a terminal at enormous expense. Now they’re bleating about being asked to pay about half the cost of their gold-plated white elephant.

Today we have Roy Keane claiming an anti-Cork bias, simply because one of his Sunderland players hasn’t been included in the Irish football squad. Perhaps it's just a wise precaution on Stan's part, given that a Corkman walked out on his country at a critical time a couple of years ago. Forgotten about that one, have you Roy?

Whingeing langers, the lot of them!

Footnote: Published as a letter in the Irish Independent but, sadly, they edited out the two best bits of the attack, those in italics above. A modified version, ending "Cork should just get over it" published by the Irish Examiner.

Timing for life

We constantly hear about female-specific cancers, but little or nothing is said about the large number of men who die each year from prostate and testicular cancers. Now, Ronan Keating is fronting a radio advertising campaign to raise awareness of these male problems.

One of the symptoms of prostate cancer is trouble having a pee, often manifested by repeated visits to the loo at night for men. When you get up in the middle of the night, you’re a bit dozy and it’s difficult to assess just how productive, or otherwise, your pee session has been in those circumstances.

Bat recently asked me why I had installed a wall clock in the loo. I explained that I wanted to time my pees, in order to have an early warning system for the onset of the dreaded prostate cancer. “But it’s got no second hand” he protested.

So?

Prick-Lit

Susan McKay, formerly the Sunday Tribune’s much respected NI correspondent, was a guest on “The View” tonight, RTE’s weekly arts, film and book review programme. Discussing a new novel by Kevin Major titled “No Man’s Land” she described it as “prick lit”.

Harold Robbins, who might claim to have been a pathfinder in that particular genre, might well be annoyed that he wasn’t accorded this accolade during his long career. It’s good for the boys to finally have something to counter the “chick lit” revolution.

I’m still smiling.

Betting ups & downs.

Cheltenham was proving a relatively expensive 4-days of tv gambling, until Kauto Star obliged in the Gold Cup on Friday, the final day of the festival. A double with Denman yielded about €130 which reduced my overall losses to about €50.

Since then a couple of obscure bets have restored liquidity to my online bookie accounts. €45 won on Ireland v. Pakistan was followed by €150 won on Vijay Singh on Sunday. What’s that old joke about him marrying Nick Faldo’s former caddy, Fanny?

Flying the flag for Ireland.

Report from the brother-in-law that no Irish flag flew over Stadio Flaminio in Rome this weekend. Instead, we were represented by a new flag featuring the crests of the four provinces, to accompany the rugby anthem “Ireland’s Call“.

If true, this development may not go down too well in GAA HQ, never mind the 800-year men around the country.

I’ll await an eye-witness report from our own 800-year man who was at the match in Rome. However, if deprived of both the national anthem and the tricolour, he may well have expired in a fit of nationalism.

Ryanair 1c flights

Aired by Pat Kenny on RTE radio today:

Pat,
Ref your earlier discussion about Aer Lingus/Ryanair average fares. Those cheap Ryanair flights look great on paper, until you factor in all the incidental costs. The wife and I are just back from 5 nights in Biarritz, which all began with a bargain Ryanair booking - 4 x1c each way Ryanair flights.

With online banking I can now see all the relevant hits on our credit card:

With additional charges, that Ryanair 4c runs up to €82.
€51 - parking at Dublin airport.
€30 - taxis from and to Biarritz airport.
€550 - 5 nights B&B in Biarritz.
€620 - meals, including wine
€610 - misc shopping - a bag, shoes, belt, top, cosmetics etc..(all female)
€280 - misc/unaccounted cash spent on beer etc

That’s a grand total of about €2,225, all starting with 4 x Ryanair "1c" flights. What’s the reverse of "from little acorns ......"?

Incidentally, the average price of a pint (watching the rugby) was €7 - the Shelbourne is looking cheap!

Regards, etc

PS - if you air this, please don’t use my name - the wife would kill me!

What we need from Scotland

Assuming that Ireland can beat Italy on Paddy’s Day in Rome, we need to win by a margin that’s 5 points greater than that by which France beat Scotland in Paris on the same day, if we‘re to win the 6 Nations Championship.

It seems to me that Scotland’s best two backs so far this year, by a considerable margin, have been Chris Paterson and Shaun Lamont, who have both been stuck out on the wings.

I’d recommend that Frank Hadden plays Paterson at outhalf and Lamont in the centre if he wants to create scoring chances for the Scottish backline. Lamont has also been a highly effective tackler, so moving him to the centre should also improve the defensive line in that critical area.

I don’t know what alternative talent they have available to fill-in on the wings, but playing your best two backs at the extremities seems a policy that’s likely to minimise returns.

Left is right

As we’re reminded by the old rhyming couplet, “coughs and sneezes spread diseases”. Consequently, we’re taught to cover our mouths when we need to cough or catch a sneeze (literally!). Most of us do this with our right hand, the same hand that we proffer for a handshake.

This has been the topic of discussion in some catholic churches, where the “sign of peace” is a handshake offered to one’s neighbours during the course of a mass. Some people are reluctant to share germs with strangers, particularly during the winter months when mass is often accompanied by a cacophony of coughing throughout the service.

The solution is relatively simple - we need to retrain ourselves to cover our mouths with our LEFT hand when we cough or sneeze. While we’re at it, we could add arse-wiping, willy-shaking and nose-picking to the list of activities for the left hand.

Could I have cracked the MRSA dilemma?

Eating for Ireland

In France recently I was reminded of the old admonition to “have breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper”.

Here in Ireland people tend to have a small breakfast, grab a sandwich for lunch and then eat a big plateful of whatever you’re having yourself, plus spuds, for dinner - before flopping down on the couch to watch tv for the night. Particularly those unfortunates who spend a couple of hours each day commuting to and from work.

The essential purpose of food is to provide fuel for the body to perform tasks. We’re running on close to empty during the day when we’re actually burning fuel, then we fill the tank in the evening when we go into couch potato mode. This allows time for the body to maximise the extraction and storage of fat from that heavy evening meal, as generally little or nothing is being burnt off through physical activity.

In France & Spain, breakfast tends to be coffee & bread/croissant, but lunch is a substantial meal and one which most people ensure they sit down and eat. Every city, town & village has a host of small restaurants to cater for this demand, and they all provide excellent value at lunchtime.

You’ll see the blackboard outside announcing today’s “Formule Midi” or “Menu del Dia”, usually a couple of courses for no more than €10 - €12. Dinner is often eaten much later in the evening and portions are usually smaller than those eaten at lunchtime. Hence, Paddy on holidays is often starving after dinner there as he’s just had the portion equivalent of a snack, instead of his usual large plate of grub at night.

The old “country “ habit of having your dinner in the middle of the day was our equivalent of eating in the continental way. Though sneered at now by our city sophisticates, who would regard it as peasant behaviour, it was a much healthier and logical approach to eating than our current lop-sided regime.

If we could repackage the old ways and invest them with a sense of Mediterranean/continental sophistication, it would be good for the general health of the country.

Safety on board

While in Biarritz, we bumped into a group of seven “lads” from Bective rugby club who were over on a short break. They turned up on the same Ryanair flight home as ourselves, where they paid the small fee for “priority boarding”.

When they boarded the plane, they filled one full row of the two which constitute the emergency exits over the wings - the surplus member of the party had to sit in the other emergency exit row. Their objective was to avail of the extra leg-room provided in those particular rows.

Now here’s the thing: all of these guys were in their 60’s, overweight and red-faced. They looked like classic candidates for a heart attack. In the event of a crash, some of them looked like they’d have difficulty getting their bulk out through the emergency exit, if they hadn’t already died of a heart attack from fright.

In other words, these six guys would probably have completely blocked access to 25% of the emergency exits, while their spare mate was probably doing the same in the row in front.

Surely there should be rules about just who can sit in these rows? I know I shouldn’t qualify.

Flying for Ireland

We left our hotel in Biarritz at about 10.45 am, walked around the corner to the taxi rank and headed for the airport. By 3.00 pm we were booting down the M50 to the Cherrywood exit, in order to get home in time for the Champion Hurdle at Cheltenham, race time 3.15. The task was accomplished with about 5 minutes to spare. I’d a small bet on Hardy Eustace, who could only finish 4th, but it was great to watch the race live.

That must be the guts of 1,000 miles travelled in less than half a day. How blasé we’ve become, we just take it all for granted, yet that 1,000 miles might be the cumulative total of several years, perhaps even a lifetime, travel for our great-grandparents.

Still, with this Global Warming debate heating up, cheap air travel may soon be a thing of the past, taxed out of existence by the rising power of the Greens. I’ve devised a new slogan for them for the upcoming general election, but I suspect they’ll pass on it - this time around.

“We have ways of making you walk!”

No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition!

I smile at the memory of Monty Python's piss-take on the Spanish Inquisition.

However a book review in this week’s Sunday Times suggests that the Inquisition may have been relative wimps when compared with the secular courts of the day. The review of “The Roman Catholic Church: An Illustrated History” by Edward Norman, reveals that only 1% of those who appeared before the Inquisition tribunals received the death penalty.

With the Inquisition, if you repented your heresy, you were given a penance. In the secular courts, if you stole a sheep and repented you were still hanged. And that was still the case into the early 19th century!

The book reviewer, Eamon Duffy, tells us that “Norman has always specialised in deconstructing the conventional pieties of liberal opinion, and this talent is entertainingly on display in his treatment of the medieval conflicts of Christianity and Islam, and that bête noire of all left-thinking people, the Inquisition. Moorish Spain has, he thinks, been romanticised: “all those placid courtyards and sparkling fountains, that poetry and art,” depended on “one of the largest slave populations the world has ever seen”: the Emir of Cordova in the 10th century maintained a harem of “6,000 women and 13,000 young boys”, and Moorish society never evolved the representative institutions, the judicial system or the concepts of individual liberty that would be the legacy of medieval Christendom. Hence “it is not surprising that Spanish Christians found Moorish moral standards defective, nor that they should have sought what is now termed regime change”. “

Ergo, the Spanish Inquisition was a good thing. Bet you weren’t expecting that!

A woman's right to choose?

Today’s Irish Times features the latest in their new “Head 2 Head” pieces, this one on the topic “Should gay and lesbian couples be allowed to adopt children?”.

Quite apart from the usual argument as to whether it’s better for the child to have a father & mother rather than a two fathers or two mothers, a major underlying concern among the straight population is undoubtedly one of uncertainty regarding the “nature or nurture” aspect of this particular topic.

Obviously, the best interests of the child must be paramount, as already decreed by existing adoption law. This shouldn’t be a social experiment, driven in part by the need to be politically correct or overly considerate of the feelings of either side in the debate. Let the science prevail.

It will be interesting to see how this adoption issue intersects with the debate around the proposed constitutional amendment to enshrine the rights of the child in the constitution. Already there are signs that this will create potential conflicts with the rights of parents and protections of the family currently enshrined in the constitution.

When it comes to the “rights of the child”, the real elephant in the room will be the question of whether these should be superseded by the “woman’s right to choose”, as they routinely seem to be at present?

At present, in sexual/reproductive matters, “the woman’s right to choose” seems to broadly cover four main options:

(a) To have sex, or not.
(b) To use contraception, or not.
(c) To have her baby fathered by a long-term partner, or not
(d) To have an abortion, or not.

I’m fully in agreement with a woman’s right to choose for Options (a) & (b) above and, if her rights under those headings have been denied, to have the rights outlined under Options (c) & (d).

However, in the context of the rights of the child being specifically enshrined in the constitution , should the child’s rights be pre-eminent in consideration of Options (c) & (d), other than in the circumstances outlined in the previous paragraph?

According to Treoir, the group representing unmarried parents, over 20,000 babies are born each year in Ireland to unmarried parents (that's about one-third of all babies), and 25% of these have no father's name on the birth certificate. In addition, it's generally accepted that over 5,000 women travel abroad each year for abortions.

Who will argue the case that many of those babies born to unmarried mothers, plus all those babies aborted, would not have better life prospects if adopted by a loving gay couple in a long-term, stable relationship?

This could be a long and heated debate.

Footnote: An edited version published as a letter in the Irish Examiner.

Tiling Dublin 4

Noel O’Gara featured again on RTE’s Today with Pat Kenny as he’s just set up a tile market in Dartmouth Square. He got a rough time from some of the programme’s listeners, particularly some naïve but rude comments about his being a red-neck with no empathy for Dublin.

The reality is that he’s just a property speculator who somehow managed to get his hands on a valuable piece of real estate at a knock-down price and he’s determined to maximise his financial gain.

To that end, he’ll do whatever he can to annoy the local population in order to ensure that local politicians pressurise the council to get this sorted out as quickly as possible. He is also, through his car-parking and tile market ventures and by talking up the possibility of apartment blocks, seeking to demonstrate the commercial value of the property when it comes to be assessed under a CPO process.

Frankly, I find it a bit rich for the politicians to be criticising O‘Gara. After all, our Dáil occupants have converted Leinster Lawn into a surface carpark for their own private use for the past several years, an act of public vandalism which is in blatant contravention of the same local planning guidelines which were used in Court to stop O'Gara operating Dartmouth Square as a car-park.

What I’d like to know is how he came to hear about the Dartmouth Square property and how he managed to buy it at such a knockdown price. Any more cheap public parks coming up in the near future?

Lies, damn lies and statistics

So Irish schools are ranked close to the bottom of an EU-wide league table for the provision of physical education (PE) classes, according to a new EU report. The report also notes that despite the recommended Department of Education guideline of 60 minutes per week, PE is not taught in some Irish primary schools. Quality of provision of PE also varies, with research showing three-quarters of classes last less than 30 minutes.

This is interesting in the light of a Dáil Exchange at Leaders Questions last Wednesday. FG leader Enda Kenny questioned Taoiseach Bertie Ahern about the level of drug experimentation among children aged 15 and under. Apparently, Ireland was ranked 4th worst overall and worst among girls in that age group in an International survey.

Bertie’s response was to criticise those who picked up on these negative statistics, while ignoring other aspects of that survey which portrayed a more positive aspect of Irish youth. As an example, he cited a finding that Irish children were ranked among the most active in that same survey - the implication being that this was as a result of Government policy in this area - compensating in some way for their lack of action/success in the under-age drugs scene.

Now we can see that whatever success is being achieved on the “activity” scale, it has nothing to do with Government policy.

Digging Jim Reeves

Bat's Cat - beginning to look like him! And has stopped moving too.

Wimbledon Wimmen

Wimbledon has decided to award identical prize money to men and women at this year’s championship. There has been some debate about the fact that men compete over 5 sets, while women compete over 3 sets. Presumably this is historical and relates to the perceived physical differences between the sexes.

However, is a 40% differential appropriate and would women’s tennis benefit, as a spectator sport, if there was a greater emphasis on the physical endurance aspect of sporting performance?

A brief look at other sports suggests that this 40% differential may well be too large:

Track & Field - the average performance differential for middle distance events e.g. 1500, 5000 & 10000 metres, among elite athletes is about 15% - ditto the marathon. In high & long jumps it’s about 20%.
Swimming - the difference in world record times for all Freestyle distances between 50m and 800m ranges between 10% - 15%.
Golf - Ladies play 18 holes of golf - the ladies tees generally reduce distance by no more than 20%, often less.
Equestrian - ladies compete on an equal footing with men in show-jumping, 3-day eventing and there are even a small number of successful lady jockeys riding professionally against the men e.g. Nina Carberry.

All this suggests that the gap between men and women in tennis should be reduced to a maximum of 20%.

Bearing in mind that there needs to be an uneven number of sets in order to ensure a winner, this could be achieved by either increasing the number of games in each of the existing 3 sets or, preferably, making it the best of 5 sets with the number of games in each set reduced e.g. first to 5 games with a two-game lead.

Those funny Shinners

The Sinn Féin Ard-Fheis has passed a motion to re-name Merrion Road, home of the British Embassy, as Bobby Sands Avenue. That’ll please the owners of the mansions along that up-market road, as it would undoubtedly knock large lumps off the value of their homes.

While they’re at it, presumably the Shinners will also re-name Parnell Sq, where the party's HQ is located. Murdering Bastards Place would seem apt.

Sleeveenism - O'Toole v. McDowell

In his Irish Times column of Feb 27th, Fintan O’Toole defined “sleeveenism” as “a combination of cunning and cowardice, the sly use of low tricks to avoid facing up to a potentially difficult situation.”

O’Toole went on to accuse Michael McDowell and the PDs of “an act of supreme sleeveenism” with regard to the Labour Party’s proposed Civil Unions Bill. To wit, the Minister for Justice’s proposal “not that the bill be rejected, but that its reading be postponed for six months. Six months from now, of course, there will be a new Dáil and all motions left over from the old Dáil will lapse. The effect of the McDowell amendment is to consign the Civil Unions Bill to oblivion without anyone having to actually vote against it. Fianna Fáil and PD TDs can go to the doorsteps, tell gay people that they support their right to equality and tell social conservatives that they sunk an attempt to recognise gay partnerships.”

In his defence, published in today's Irish Times, Michael McDowell states that “it would be a mistake and politically dishonest to accept the Labour Bill. It would be especially wrong to do so in the context of legal advice that the central scheme of the Labour Party Bill was unconstitutional.”

If Michael McDowell felt so strongly about the demerits of the Labour bill, he should have voted against it, rather than kicking it into limbo. Regardless of which man is correct on the legal argument, I believe that the charge of political sleeveenism has been proven, based on the defendant’s own testimony.

I rest my case.

Footnote: Published as a letter in the Irish Times.

Flogging the Public Service

Based on my 22 Feb Blog re public service staffing levels, I’ve sent the following letter to all three national broadsheets and a variety of radio commentators e.g. Pat Kenny, Vincent Browne, Matt Cooper, George Hook. Not published, to date, which isn’t a major surprise given the length of the piece. However, if the commentators take the time to read the piece it might influence their approach to public service topics in the future.

Dear ….
The National Economic & Social Forum (NESF) report “Improving the Delivery of Quality Public Services”, published in December 2006, calls for major reforms to the way public services are delivered in Ireland in order to make them more customer focused and to help people to seamlessly access those services they require. These recommendations will hopefully form the backbone of some political party’s promises to us in the run-up to the election. Getting better value for an estimated €39bn spend on public services would surely be a big prize indeed.

While the NESF recommendations may seem highly aspirational, they may not require incremental funding if introduced as part of a root and branch reform of the public services, for it is just possible that currently that Public Service may be overstaffed by as much as 35%.
It is difficult to form a coherent picture of relative efficiency or appropriate staffing levels within the public service, but some former and current semi-state companies may provide a reasonable proxy, given that they shared, with the wider public service, the same ultimate owner representing "the public interest" and the same unions representing the staff interest.

Since the mid-1990’s, Eircom has shed approx. 5,000 employees, ESB has shed 3,000 and Aer Lingus 3,000. In combination, these three companies have reduced their combined total workforce from about 31,000* to about 20,000 in a little over 10 years, a 35% reduction. The impact on customer service arising from these changes has been interesting: your new home phone will now be installed in days rather than years, while Aer Lingus fly many more of us to a multitude of interesting new destinations at much reduced fares.

This analysis may be somewhat crude but it does pose a serious question as to the likely staffing levels, efficiency and value for money we are getting from the Public Service Sector as a whole. The modus operandi employed in the recent restructure of the eleven Health Boards into the HSE suggests that a prima facie case exists to support this hypothesis. The overall employment scenario implied in this analysis would cover a variety of outcomes - from functions which are understaffed, or even in need of creation, to those which are heavily overstaffed, or even functionally redundant.

The bench-marking process was supposed to provide parity between the public and private sectors, which should presumably have included measures of productivity and efficiency. It’s quite clear that the process has actually achieved little by way of reform to extract value for money, while there is a wide consensus that much of the public service is now significantly overpaid, relative to its private sector peers, notwithstanding the security of employment and
gold-plated pensions enjoyed by the public service.

The wasted opportunity of bench-marking has been further compounded by the fallout from the 2003 decentralisation stroke, which must have seriously damaged trust among middle and senior public service management, effectively killing any prospect of proactive proposals for material change and flexibility from this key group of employees.

The incoming administration must make root and branch reform of the Public Service a key objective, reminding all concerned of the explicit promise in the title of that employment. This NESF report would make an excellent pump-primer for such a review. One immediate
step should be to suspend, temporarily or permanently, the 2003 decentralisation plan which can only further embed the existing inflexible structure and continue to alienate Public Service
management. Such a move should also provide some inducement for the Unions to play their own part in the necessary reform. The next phase of bench-marking should be a very different animal, with the emphasis on reform, restructure and redeployment of resources to actually
deliver the public services which the public need and are able to access.

In the meantime, as the election approaches, Public Service unions will be maximising their effort to extract further concessions in exchange for industrial peace.
Regards, etc.

* Eircom (then Telecom Eireann)1994 13,000 to 8,000 in 2004, -38%
ESB 1997 11,500 to 8,300 in 2005, -28%
Aer Lingus 2002 6,500 to 3,500 in 2006, -46%

Footnote: an edited version (essentially the bits in italics) published by the Irish Independent.

Give us our jacks back.

The following letter is published in today's Irish Times. I’ve been waiting for some time to have a go at Owen Keegan, County Manager Dun Laoghaire - Rathdown County Council, and a recent letter in the Irish Times criticising the many eyesores on the South County Dublin Coastline provided a good opportunity.

Madam, - AJ Rous (February 27th) is disappointed at the state of the bandstand and its roofless companion shelter on Dún Laoghaire's East Pier, one of the borough's most popular amenities. Both structures are the responsibility of the county council, rather than the Harbour Company which recently improved the paving and lighting on the pier.

He didn't comment on the state of the public toilets, which are also the responsibility of the county council, and have been closed for well over 12 months. There is no indication as to why they are closed, when they might re-open, or where alternative facilities might be found.

Dún Laoghaire residents would be grateful if county manager Owen Keegan could display the same zeal for providing such essential public facilities as he does for increasing the revenue generated from car parking and clamping. Perhaps before the weather improves and the walkers come out in force, he might find time to do something about this.
Yours etc, Peter Molloy

Bertie's brand of english.

Bertie Ahern is famous for the facility with which he can mangle the English language.

So it came as no surprise that, at Leader’s Questions today, in response to a question from Enda Kenny about the level of drug sampling among teenagers, Bertie defended his government’s record in the fight against drugs, listing the various measures to educate young people and provide rehab facilities for addicts, including significant investment in “detoxication” programmes.

No, I can't find it in the dictionary either.

The New Stickies

In today’s Irish Independent, Senan Molony reports that Sinn Féin's Mary Lou McDonald has rejected the suggestion that she was constantly seen 'doughnutting' Gerry Adams to the detriment of her role and attendance as an MEP. "I am not a doughnut," she said.

The joke is that Mary Lou and Caitriona Ruane have become the "New Stickies“, as they seem to be physically attached to the great man whenever the cameras are present.

Footnote: Published as a letter in the Irish Independent

Chick Lit reviewed

Ryan Tubridy was having a discussion about Chick Lit on RTE this morning, so I felt obliged to offer a view, which he aired, including my full name. I'm not just in trouble with the wife!


"Chick-Lit is popular because it's perfectly in tune with many modern women - a self-obsessed, self-indulgent, "because I'm worth it", retail therapy group.

Generally as intellectually shallow as a car-park puddle.

Jade Goody is a timely warning for where it can all end up."

Ireland 43 England 13

It was great to beat England so well, particularly as they only managed to get 13. One less than the last time they played in Croker when they got 14.

Public Service - 36% overstaffed?

It is difficult to form any coherent picture of relative efficiency or appropriate staffing levels within the public service, but perhaps a look into some of the semi-state companies would be a reasonable proxy, given that they share, with the wider public service, the same ultimate owner representing "the public interest" and the same unions representing the staff. Information on these is more readily available, both from published annual accounts and from media analysis of the privatisation prospectus issued in the case of some such as Eircom and Aer Lingus.

Based on the three "case studies" below, it is possible to surmise that the wider Public Service may be overmanned by approximately 36%. This average will cover a variety of outcomes - from functions which are understaffed to those which might be 100% overstaffed, or whose function might even be redundant.

Eircom in 1994 had approx. 13,000 employees and you waited for a couple of years to get a home phone installed. Through very generous early retirement and voluntary redundancy deals, couple with giving 14.9% of the company to the employees via the ESOT (Employee Share Ownership Trust), this number had reduced to 8,000 by the end of 2004 and your home phone would be installed within days of your request being received. That’s a 38% reduction in staff numbers coupled with a massive increase in efficiency.

ESB in 1997 had 11,500 employees which reduced to 8,300 by end 2005, a reduction of 28% in staffing levels without any noticeable reduction in service levels. This was again achieved through very generous early retirement and voluntary redundancy deals, coupled with significant salary increases for employees who remained behind. A recent survey estimated that average ESB salaries were 40% higher than their UK peers, with some power station operatives grossing up to €140k per annum when overtime and shift allowances are factored in. (According to 2005 annual accounts, the average salary across all 8,300 employees was €65k). ESB staff numbers will have reduced even further since 2005, including 400 staff in their retail network of 54 shops which was sold to Halifax.

Aer Lingus in 2002 had approx. 6,500 employees which reduced to approx. 3,500 by end-2006, a massive 46% reduction in staffing levels in a period when it has greatly expanded its European route network and increased the number of passengers carried. Achievement of this reduction was greatly assisted by an industry background where long-established national carriers such as Sabena and Swissair (both much larger than Aer Lingus) went into liquidation and ceased operations, and through the use of generous early retirement and voluntary redundancy deals, coupled with significant salary increases for employees who remained behind and a 14.9% ESOT stake in the airline at the time of privatisation. Unfortunately for Aer Lingus employees, Ryanair’s dawn raid on the stock, acquiring over 25% and launching a takeover bid, has forced Aer Lingus management to revisit the staffing/efficiency cupboard again. This threatens to be a year of industrial unrest in Aer Lingus.

If any or all of these three semi-states are indicative of the manning and efficiency levels being achieved within the public services generally, then we really are wasting billions, perhaps tens of billions, of euros every year. Whatever opportunity existed to use the bench-marking process to achieve changes in structures and work practices, in order to deliver value for money, has been well and truly wasted. Bench-marking has been, as correctly predicted by the INTO’s Senator Joe O’Toole, “a stroll to the ATM”.

McDowell's Word of Honour

Minister for Justice Michael McDowell gave his word of honour to the Dáil that he had “no hand, act or part” in the arrest of journalist Mick McCaffrey over the leaking of a report into the Dean Lyons case.

Then under questioning it emerged that (a) the complaint to the gardai was made by the Secretary of the Dept of Justice and (b) McDowell was aware that this action was being taken.

Clearly he could have stopped this complaint being lodged if he so wished.

He must have no understanding of the meaning of “sins of omission”, and his initial denial “on his word of honour” has been exposed as weasel words that might be technically correct but are morally bankrupt.

Rats find new ships

Having established that BUPA was a just bunch of buccaneers, bent on screwing super-profits out of the medical health insurance market in Ireland, you’d be forgiven for thinking that their top people would be pariahs in business, at least until a reasonable period of time had elapsed.

Not so, for the chief of the pirates, ex-BUPA Chairman Maurice Keane was, on 15th February 2007, appointed as a member of the National Pensions Reserve Fund Commission by Minister for Finance Brian Cowen.

I suppose he had time on his hands.

Lenten sacrifice

I've decided to give up all types of sweets, chocolate bars etc for Lent, but mainly for width.

Clarifying when life begins, or doesn't!

When a sperm fertilizes an egg, the result is a cell called a Zygote and has all the DNA of both parents. The Zygote then begins to divide by mitosis to produce a multi-cellular organism which becomes an Embryo.

The debate about the “right to life” involves many groups who believe that life begins at the moment of fertilisation of the egg. This appears to be the official position of the Catholic Church.
However, Church practice today, Ash Wednesday, appears to contradict its own interpretation of when life begins.

Let me explain.

Ash Wednesday (and Good Friday) is a Fast Day for Catholics, when they are forbidden to eat meat. This prohibition includes chicken and other poultry.

However, Catholics are permitted to eat fish and eggs on Fast Days. There is no distinction made between whether the eggs are fertilised and unfertilised. But if the egg was fertilised, and the Church believes that life begins at fertilisation, then such a fertilised egg would, if fact, have become a chicken in the eyes of the Church and its consumption would consequently be prohibited on a Fast Day.

Q.E.D.

Should I send this to the Pope?

Drug smugglers avoid check-in & baggage reclaim delays

Today’s Irish Times reports that Weston Airport, owned by Jim Mansfield of Citywest fame, has been facilitating foreign flights illegally. The report states that between 600 and 800 such flights have used the airport over the past three years. There is no permanent Immigration, Police or Customs & Excise presence at the airport.

Mr Mansfield is quoted as saying that, before gardai contacted him, he was unaware that he should not be facilitating some planes and passengers.

Last September, Belgian police seized €6m worth of cocaine and heroin as it was about to be loaded onto Jim Mansfield’s private jet for transportation to Ireland via Weston. Mansfield denied all knowledge of the affair, claiming that he didn’t even know that his plane had
been taken out of the country. You’d have to wonder just how many of those 600-800 flights were involved in drug-smuggling?

A reasonable man on the 46A bus would say that it was Mansfield’s plane, his airport and a huge haul of illegal drugs and could only conclude that Jim Mansfield and his associates should be the subject of a thorough investigation by the Garda Drug Squad.

In addition, the gardai should throw the book at him for multiple and serious breaches of Aviation, Immigration and Customs & Excise regulations. Ignorance of the law is no defence.

In any event, Mr Mansfield has already demonstrated his complete contempt for planning regulations with regard to Citywest, so why would anyone believe that he would adopt a different attitude to irksome Government regulations with regard to the running of his
private airport. A lengthy jail sentence might be the appropriate outcome.

Fianna Fáil will hold their pre-election Ard-Fheis in Citywest Hotel in March 2007, the party's 2006 Ard-Fheis was also held there last November. Jim Mansfield was a guest at Bertie Ahern’s Dublin Central Constituency annual Christmas party, held in the Clontarf Castle on December 2nd last.

But this will not inhibit investigation and prosecution of Mr Mansfield, will it? Am I holding my breath?

Bertie's Ashes

Bertie Ahern may be one of the few true socialists in the Dáil, but now it looks like he might be the only real Catholic too.

At Leaders Questions today, he sported the only visible smudge of ashes on his forehead in the Dáil Chamber.

In the gallery was a deputation of about 6 representatives of various State Legislatures from the USA, there to watch proceedings.

Hopefully someone had explained the relevance of the smudge and they didn’t go away thinking that he had a very perfunctory wash this morning and is without access to a mirror.

Thanking the Government

As the election approaches, the electorate is constantly reminded of the debt of gratitude we owe to the current Coalition Government for the success of the Irish economy.

That economic success has been largely built on the growth in commercial activity in Ireland, which has been fueled by two main factors; the lowest Corporation Tax rate (12.5%) in the industrialised world, introduced by Ruairi Quinn as Finance Minister in the last Rainbow Coalition Government, and historically low interest rates which are determined by the European Central Bank.

The latter has also helped to maintain the frenetic activity in the residential housing market, sustaining high levels of employment in that sector and hugely boosting revenue receipts of VAT & Stamp Duty. It is widely acknowledged that our economy has become over-dependent on the Construction sector, both for employment and also for revenue receipts. Any setback in this area would have major knock-on consequences for the whole economy.

While the main drivers of economic success have had little to do with the current Government, things which are their direct responsibility e.g. the Health Service, Transport, Gang/Gun Crime, meeting Kyoto targets etc are all in a chaotic state. Major initiatives undertaken by this Government such as Decentralisation, Bench-marking, eVoting, PPARS etc have all demonstrated a breath-taking level of incompetence.

The Government has been awash with money, which it has thrown at every problem area where it perceives there might be votes. It has bought industrial peace in the public service at enormous current and future cost, but has failed miserably to achieve any meaningful reform in associated structures and work practices, which is badly needed to improve delivery of services and extract value for money. It has even managed, every year, to miscalculate the state of the public finances. Luckily these miscalculation, by billions of euros, have been on the positive side of the accounts - to date.

Whatever about lacking experience in Government, any alternative administration could hardly be more lacking in competence than the current lot.

Footnote: Published as a letter in the Irish Times, the Irish Independent & the Irish Examiner.

W(h)ither the PDs?

Take McDowell’s word for it - it can’t be auction politics if it’s the PDs who are doing it, but there’s no doubting the desperation of their pre-election promises, spurred by that recent 1% opinion poll result.

Even if the PDs don’t achieve melt-down in the upcoming election, there seems to be a growing consensus that Fianna Fail are likely to lose seats and will need a larger coalition partner if it’s to form part of the next Government, hence the constant wooing of Labour.

So even if McDowell returns with the same number of seats - or even a modest increase - the PDs are likely to find themselves sitting on the opposition benches.

It’s hard to see what relevance or influence they’ll have from that particular perch. McDowell has discarded any remaining shreds of the moral authority which was long the hallmark of the party, though which had been rapidly fading as the party made compromise after compromise in order to stay in Government. The PDs have progressed from supposedly being a watchdog to prevent Fianna Fail excesses to being their poodle and political mudguard.

McDowell’s not a consensus player and had managed to insult just about every existing opposition party on an ongoing basis for the past several years, so he’s hardly going to be welcomed into the “opposition club”.

Without any input to Government decisions or influence on public opinion, the PDs will undoubtedly wither and their membership drift away to apathy or other political parties. Even if they don’t implode at the upcoming election, it’s hard to see them survive the following Dail term as a coherent political force.
Hopefully.

Our Eurovision Entry

I heard Ireland’s entry for this year's Eurovision Song Contest on the radio today.

Frankly it’s crap - a "70's-style liberal sentiments" song performed by a band (Dervish) whose singing style is several decades earlier.

I expect this John Waters effort to get about the same final score as he got in The Restaurant, screened on RTE earlier last week - Deux Points!

Radio Mooney

It comes as no surprise to me that Matt Cooper’s Last Word on Today FM has overtaken RTE’s Drivetime in the listenership ratings war.

There’s two hours of drivel on RTE before Drivetime, under the stewardship of Derek Mooney, aided and abetted by Brenda O’Donoghue.

I rarely turn off the radio but am all to frequently inspired to do so by this irksome duet. Mooney has a habit of offering strong but gormless opinions on serious topics about which he clearly knows nothing, while O’Donoghue seems to have been drafted in to take the pressure off Mooney by saying and doing stupid things.

The latest whiz to keep listeners happy is a “best bag of chips in Ireland” competition which will be conducted by Brenda and her great friend “Paulio Tullo”. Since his name is Paulo Tullio and pronounced that way, it’s clear she never met the man before in her life. When he laughed at her effort to say his name, she made a couple of extra pathetic efforts, each one confirming that she didn‘t know the man at all.

This really is crap radio and must have listeners switching stations or switching off in their droves.

The family reared in hell

It reads like the storyline for a horror movie of unrelenting awfulness, but the Murphy household in Dalkey was no work of fiction.

The clear inference of the testimony, presented to this weeks inquest into the death of a new-born baby in 1973, is that the children were sexually abused by their father and brother, and also pimped to other local men who included at least one member of the gardai.

Peter & Josephine Murphy raised 10 children, including a granddaughter who subsequently committed suicide leaving a 35-page suicide note, which documented claims of being sexually abused in her grandparents house. Two sons are also dead, one by suicide and the other found dead in dense bushes near Killiney DART station , three years after he went missing.

There is one redeeming feature to this story of the family reared in hell: 30+ years after the event, the truth is finally out and hopefully some sense of delayed justice and closure has been given to the surviving victims of the abuse. It will be interesting to see if any charges are brought against the father and brother who have been accused of molesting the surviving girls. Both men deny that they ever raped their family members.

There now remains the need to investigate the role of the local gardai, both in the actual abuse itself and in the failure to act on earlier complaints by Cynthia Owens. Given the time that has elapsed it’s unlikely that anything can be proven against the non-family abusers, but the victims are entitled to have the effort made on their behalf.

The end of the road?

An ominous email received yesterday.

Dear Mr Molloy, -- Is it right to assume that any letters from you which do not refer specifically to items in The Irish Times will also have been sent to the Irish Independent? -- Yours, Liam McAuley, Letters Editor, The Irish Times

I've sent the following reply, which hasn't produced any response:

Dear Liam,
In recent months that has regularly, though not universally, been the case. I read several papers daily, including the IT & Indo, and noticed that many letters page contributors had adopted this approach. Do you have a problem with this?
Regards, Peter

On 20th February I emailed this follow-up:

Dear Liam,
Caitriona Walsh has a letter on PDs/Tribunals in today’s IT & Indo. Ciaran MacAonghusa has his “Culture of Contentment” letter in today’s Indo - you published it on Saturday. David Sowby has a letter on nuclear power in today’s Indo, you had a one from him on The Red Cow last Saturday.
Yesterday, your Opinion page carried a piece on “God Save the Queen” by Gerald Morgan, a man whose letters I often see replicated in all three national broadsheets.
This is just a small sample from a couple of days to illustrate the point that letter writing is a fairly promiscuous activity - the writers want to be published and, if they can’t be confident of having their way with “madam“, they’ll also try some other ladies.
What I find interesting is the reactions I get from family, friends, acquaintances - it’s quite distinct audiences for the Times & the Indo - very few “ordinary” people seem to read both.
Regards, Peter

Footnote: On 21st Feb, the Irish Times published a letter - essentially my blog of 19th Feb "Thanking the Govt"

Spending on the Dáil

Just watched Taoiseach's Questions on RTE 1 - the Dáil chamber was no more than 50% full.

When RTE coverage finished, I switched to Dáil Beo on TG4, where the Taoiseach continued to take questions - from Trevor Sargent and Arthur Morgan.

Trevor was the only Green TD left in the chamber, ditto Arthur for SF. Enda Kenny remained with one FG sidekick, while Bertie's benches were empty apart from Tom Parlon.

There have been media reports in recent months of plans to spend millions upgrading the Dáil chamber in order to accomodate a larger number of TDs required by our increasing population.

Another waste of public money, which seems to flow like water when funding is required for politicians' vanity projects. Let any TD who can't find a seat stand in the chamber or sit on the steps - just as they do in Westminster.

Dunphy Mellow, not a pretty sight

Eamon Dunphy has a one-hour programme on RTE radio every Saturday morning where he interviews one subject and plays 3 or 4 pieces of music selected by his guest.

This is the mellow Dunphy, fully in touch with his feminine side, who never gets aggressive or even asks an awkward question. Many of these interviews sound like a meeting of a small mutual admiration society.

Last Saturday’s guest was Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary, another man noted for his robust and acerbic treatment of anyone who annoys or disagrees with him.

There wasn’t a raised voice or uncomfortable moment in the entire hour for the two boys. Here was a pair of chilled-out, laid-back, mellow lads just shooting the breeze. You couldn’t imagine butter melting in the mouth of either man.

It was hard to marry those images with earlier ones of Dunphy, the poisonous toad at the time of Saipan and his subsequent vilification of all things McCarthy, or O’Leary who has a well earned reputation as a mean-spirited and vindictive employer rather than just a PR motor-mouth on behalf of Ryanair.

Dunphy on football is a somewhat different animal, though he does seem to have calmed down a lot on his regular RTE football panel appearances. He’s calling for the departure of Steve Staunton, though that’s hardly a unique or surprising view. At the outset he was prepared to give Stan the benefit of the doubt, but that’s all changed now. He was previously a big fan of Brian Kerr‘s appointment until he too proved incapable of getting Ireland to any major championship.

Isn’t it gas to remember that the two managers he really hated all the time were Jack Charlton and Mick McCarthy. Yet Jack got us to World Cups in Italy (1990) and USA (1994), while Mick got us to Korea & Japan (2002). Perhaps we should ask Eamon to draw up a shortlist of definite non-runners for Irish manager and then pick one of those.

Hospital fraud?

Last Wednesday’s Irish Times reported Health Minister Mary Harney as saying in a Dail debate that if a private patient arrived in a public hospital, the consultant received a fee, irrespective of what bed the patient was in.

This seems to indicate that anyone with private health insurance is charged for their stay in a public hospital, regardless of how they got there or what treatment they received.

If you arrive in a public ward bed in hospital via their A&E Department or via a public waiting list, surely your PRSI payments have covered you for this service? Why should your health insurer be asked to pay on the double?

What are the implications if hospitals are charging VHI, BUPA & Vivas for routine admissions to public beds and associated procedures?
1. People who pay both PRSI & Health Insurance are deprived of their entitlements under PRSI.
2. Costs for Health Insurers are inflated with the knock-on effect on annual premiums for members.
3. The hospital is incentivised to extend your stay as a revenue generating measure, when there is clearly a shortage of beds.

Are we in a situation that, in those circumstances, you should refuse to provide information about having health insurance, unless you are being provided with a bed in a private or semi-private ward?

If this is how the system operates, could this be a fraud perpetrated against the health insurers by the hospitals?

The unmanageable in pursuit of the unbiddable

According to the HSE website:
“The establishment (in 2004) of the HSE represents the beginning of the largest programme of change ever undertaken in the Irish public service.
Prior to this, services were delivered through a complex structure of ten regional Health Boards, the Eastern Regional Health Authority and a number of other different agencies and organisations. The HSE replaces all of these organisations.
It is now the single body responsible for ensuring that everybody can access cost effective and consistently high quality health and personal social services. The service will be delivered making best use of resources allocated by Government. The largest employer in the State, the HSE employs more than 65,000 staff in direct employment and a further 35,000 staff are funded by the HSE. The budget of almost €12 billion is the largest of any public sector organisation.”

Oscar Wilde described fox-hunting as “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable”. To paraphrase Wilde, the current HSE/Hospital Consultants dispute is “the unmanageable in pursuit of the unbiddable”.

When the HSE was formed and the multiple regional health boards abolished, there should have been multiple redeployments, early retirements and redundancies among staff of those bodies. In any real business this would have been the inevitable consequence of the merger.

Instead, in the interests of industrial peace, the Government conceded that there would be no redundancies and no forced relocations. The end result must be an organisation with multiple duplications and overlaps, sections with no real function to perform, disgruntled employees who have lost status and career prospects.

The result is that there is probably a substantial “fifth column”, some of it at quite senior level, working within the HSE to undermine the organisation and prove that the new structure is unworkable. This “fifth column” is undoubtedly welcomed and abetted by representatives of the various interest groups who are at odds with the HSE - not just employee groups such as consultants and nurses, but also local hospital support groups.

The Government replicated this flawed approach in its efforts to cover up the complete nonsense that is their 2003 Decentralisation Strategy, happy to waste public service employees and public money to disguise its own incompetence.

The danger now is that, with the next election in sight, the Government will simply try to buy industrial peace in the Health Service by conceding on all fronts, wasting even more public money. If this approach is adopted, it simply digs an even deeper hole into which more money is poured and increases the risk of the whole health service becoming even more dysfunctional.

Footnote: Excluding sections in italics, published as a letter in the Irish Independent. An edited version also appeared in the Irish Examiner on 26th Feb.

A good start to the weekend!

Just as I heard the bad news that O'Driscoll (and Stringer) won't play against France on Sunday, my doorbell rang.

A courier delivery contained a pleasant surprise. It was from Cooley Distillery and contained 3 bottles of The Tyrconnell Single Malt Whiskey. The delivery note was from Cooley and the only clue was a cryptic "letter of the week" annotation.

I can only assume it's from the Independent Group - though whether it relates to daily or Sunday, or which letter it's for, I have no idea.

However, it's a first tangible reward for all the letter writing and a bloody good start to the weekend. Cheers, Sir Anthony.

For Whom the Bell Tolls?

Under the headline “It is time we found out for whom the RTE Angelus bell tolls”, Bruce Arnold (Sunday Independent 4th Feb) has serious points to make regarding the potential clash between religion and medical ethics, and concerns about the influence of the catholic church on our politicians, but uses the Angelus on RTE to first alienate a sizeable portion of his readership.

The Angelus oppresses no-one, even if it seems to offend Mr Arnold. There is a world of difference between being offended and being oppressed.

The Angelus represents part of the tradition and culture of a sizeable majority of the native population of the Republic to which RTE broadcasts.

The political correctness which seeks to dictate that the majority should abandon non-oppressive traditions in order to show respect to minorities is surely a flawed approach. If the majority show such scant regard for its own traditions, what does that say for its likely respect for minority traditions in future years?

Footnote: Published as a letter in the Sunday Independent.

Mayday call for the PDs?

Is it all hands to the pumps on the sinking PD ship?

Today’s Irish Times reports the resignation of PD Director of Policy Seamus Mulconry (my old sparring partner), while in the past 7-10 days the spouses of prominent PD Ministers have been engaging in media outings.

Brian Geoghegan a.k.a. “Mr Harney” has had letters published in both the Irish Times & Irish Independent attacking the opposition. Meanwhile, Dr Niamh Brennan a.k.a. “Mrs McDowell” appeared last Sunday on Marian Finucane’s RTE magazine programme. Although she attacked Pat Rabbitte, Labour Party leader, for seeming to keep his post-election options open, she was never identified as the wife of the PD leader. Is Marian a closet PD supporter or just a desperate housewife who still loves FF?

Hopefully the next election will see the demise of the PDs. If they fail to form a part of the next Government it’s not too hard to see them withering away quietly. A May election could really become a MAYDAY (distress) signal from the PDs.

Hospital Consultants again

My 26/1/07 blog "Breaking the Consultants Stranglehold", published in the Indo (and Examiner) produced three published responses, including one from the IHCA (who also sent a hard copy to my home address). My riposte, below, was published in the Independent on Friday 2nd Feb 07.

Dear Sir - My attack on hospital consultants (Letters, January 30) has resulted in several hostile responses from the profession, doubtless a very small sample of those you received. A common theme of those responses is that hospital consultants are much maligned and made the scapegoats for all the problems in the health service.

I think they have only themselves and their IHCA to blame if their own PR has failed to convince the public. However, the public does recognise that problems within the health service are multifactorial, as stated by Brendan O'Hare, medical director of paediatric intensive care at Our Lady's Hospital, and that consultants are only part of the problem.

Hospital consultants are the most highly educated, highly skilled and highly paid group in the Health service. Their salaries equate to those enjoyed by very senior executives in business, probably far more than those paid to the much-maligned hospital administrators, and they should be providing active leadership at local level to help sort out the variety of operational issues which plague their hospitals.

Instead, the most powerful of the many vested interest groups working within the health service are perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be standing back from those local operational issues.

Rather than waiting for the "big strategy" which will solve all problems, they must adopt the maxim "think globally, act locally." In other words, each individual consultant and group of consultants must be seen to tackle those problems within their own span of control, accepting that some of their solutions will be temporary and/or sub-optimal.

The Government (and the taxpayer) is rightly reluctant to simply pour more money into a dysfunctional Health system when far too much of it seems to end up in enhanced salaries rather than enhanced services.

If hospital consultants took a visible leadership role in achieving change, they would greatly influence the other vested interest groups, including HSE and Government, to actively participate in the process.

In such a changed environment, the Government would also be prepared to invest more money in the health system. I am sure that taxpayers would support that investment. Yours etc