AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
Do you ever get the feeling that the Government gets some of its priorities wrong? If you or I got an amazing windfall we would most likely spend it on something that would really make a difference rather than put it towards general expenses where it would get swallowed without trace.
Not so with the Government’s €14 billion Apple windfall. As individual Ministers write their wish lists like letters to Santa, we have been told that the windfall is to be spent on infrastructure.
I have a few suggestions about how it could be spent to deal with things we have been putting up with for much too long. It might seem trivial but take an everyday inconvenience and you are out in a town or city and you need to pee but where do you go when you need to go?
Millions have been spent on cycle lanes (sometimes in places where cyclists aren’t to be seen) and on racks to hold electric bikes for hire. But public conveniences are in woefully short supply. Toilets usually hidden in some distant corner of a shopping mall requiring a sat nav to find them or you buy a coffee so you can use the facilities in a café.
The way things are you can pedal but you can’t piddle.
Moving on to tragic issues: the situation at Limerick University Hospital (LUH) has been an ongoing scandal for years. How many more avoidable deaths – like 16 year-old Aoife Johston who died because of lack of attention and life-saving antibiotics to treat meningitis – will there be in the chronically over-crowded, poorly managed hospital if there isn’t a remedy? How much would it cost to get one of the hospitals in the region, where their closures contributed to the crisis at LHU, repurposed and running again? Surely only a fraction of the €2.3 billion spent so far on the troubled National Children’s Hospital (NCH).
Why not tackle some of the issues which have been dragging on through the headlines in a way that shames a country as wealthy as ours?
There are nearly 300 children in need on scoliosis/spina bifida surgery on waiting lists, some of them for years. Why not beef up the unit to treat them, bringing in additional specialists and nurses, instead of kicking the can down the road and sending these children with their parents overseas for treatment in the US or UK, especially when some families involved are not in a position to travel.
What about the H word? There are more than 2,000 homeless families, two thirds of them Irish and over half of them are single parent families. Even at the exorbitant €500,000 cost of building a house in Dublin (or €400,000 elsewhere), it would take €1,000 million to clear the housing list, less than a tenth of the Apple money. It could cost a great deal less if different housing systems were used. What people want is their own front door rather than being asked to spend around €1,500 a month or more for non-existent rental property.
How much would giving everyone cut-price transport or even free transport – assuming that there are busses or trains available – to cut down on carbon emissions? Or promote a share car system like the successful Open Fleet system used in France?
One of the great things about a windfall in private life is that you can meet needs that you couldn’t afford before. Wouldn’t it be worth investing in consultants to set up a new body and sweep away the bureaucratic Augean Stable of our planning system which blocks progress? Might be an idea to do the same with the Health Service Executive (HSE). We spend well above the EU average per capita on health, yet we have we have among the lowest number of beds and doctors, although surprisingly perhaps, we have the best life expectancy at 82.
More radically still, how much would it cost to create a national health service rather than our two-tier system, where if you are insured you get treated and if you aren’t you wait for treatment?
Or how about a purpose-built reception centre to process asylum seekers rapidly with an integration or a return system to their country of entry.
I can always wish…
