Scairbh
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EMYVALE
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Dear Dear Deer.
The real truth is being proven once again – patients don’t matter but deer do. The Greens and this Government hopes to put an end to deer hunting as it causes distress and stress to the deer. However removing acute health services from within reaching distance of humans is OK. Forcing sick people to travel to distant hospitals for treatment, forcing people to drive long distances to be with their loved ones who are ill, forcing patients to attend hospitals which are overflowing already, forcing patients to lie on trolleys in corridors while hospital beds lie idle in Monaghan, forcing patients in dire need of urgent treatment to suffer a long journey and risk dying on the way, forcing people to pay the extra costs involved in travelling to these distant hospitals, forcing the elderly and the young to go to strange environments with strange carers miles from home, forcing people to accept an advanced paramedic as an alternative to A & E and then doubling the area to be covered by that paramedic thus putting more people at risk, – these are all ‘better services’ and totally appropriate methods of providing health services according to this Government. Such treatment would not be acceptable for animals and the Greens would be first to say so.
This is the Green Party which gave assurances in writing to the people of Monaghan prior to the last election that they would ensure that services were not downgraded in Monaghan General Hospital. This is the Green Party which is so concerned about carbon footprints and carbon emissions yet make the people of Monaghan drive further and further to access acute health services in distant hospitals and at the same time put a carbon tax on fuel. This is a Green Party so concerned about the environment that they have extra ambulances driving about our roads. This is a Government which listened to experts yet allowed this country go into meltdown economically. This is a Government which will bail out banks, building societies and developers but not sick people. This is a Government that will make the poor poorer and the rich richer.
It will also make the sick sicker with the type of health policy they are pursuing. This is a Government being led astray by ‘health experts’ who will benefit from the new transformation programmes. This is a Government doing untold damage to our health services – damage which will take decades to rectify.
Yet the people of this country are more concerned about wild life and hunting, or so it seems from the amount of time that has been spent in the Dail, in the media, and at various meetings, discussing the issue of deer hunting. Meanwhile the health services continue to blunder along. Services are removed from Dundalk exposing the people of Carlingford and the Cooley peninsula to serious risk at times of emergency. Monaghan has already suffered that fate but we did not get the ‘better services’ that we were promised. Our excellent in-patient medical services are gone. Our saviour in times of heart attacks is gone and now our ‘advanced paramedic’ will in future be based at Castleblayney. This is to share the paramedic with North Louth. Now it has been with a prayer that only one call-out at a time has happened in Monaghan so far but sooner or later the paramedic will be needed in two places at one time but where will he/she go? Sooner or later the paramedic will be needed in Clara but he/she will have to travel from Castleblayney or North Louth. What hope for the Clara patient? Perhaps they will demand what Doc-on-call does – take the patient to meet the paramedic in Castleblayney.
And they try to tell us that this is a ‘better service’? They try to tell us that this is ‘safer for the patient’? They try to convince us that what they are doing is ‘good for us’? There have been too many lives lost and extra trauma and suffering for us to believe them any more – but then they have the support of the Minister and this Government and these people who are making these decisions and making others implement them are untouchable, lacking in accountability and have no mandate from the people of Ireland to do what they are doing. We need a Government which will take control of the affairs of this country and make decisions that will benefit people first and, when that’s done, we can then look at the animals.
Members of the Alliance, with party representatives from Monaghan County Council, met with Dr. James O’Reilly, Health spokesperson for Fine Gael on Monday night last. Earlier in the evening he had visited Monaghan General Hospital and met with administrative staff there. He was informed of all the enhanced services there – physiotherapy, Speech therapy, and a whole host of therapies but he was not impressed. He stated to us that acute medical services with an Acute Coronary Care Unit was essential for Monaghan and that Fine Gael, if in power, would work towards returning those services to Monaghan. However he did warn that it would get more difficult to do so as time went on and that two years hence it might be too late to be able to restore the services. We hope that this is party policy as we were given to understand from a previous interview by the Northern Standard with Enda Kenny that Fine Gael would not restore these services. Since the Alliance came into existence in 2002 we have been fed promise after promise by many people but we still lost our acute in-patient services. At this stage we cannot allow our hopes to be raised again unless we see practical evidence of a promise being fulfilled.