Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

In 1948 a leaflet was delivered to every home in the United Kingdom. It stated:

Your new National Health Service begins on 5th July. What is it? How do you get it? It will provide you with all medical, dental and nursing care. Everyone – rich or poor, man, woman or child - can use it or any part of it. There are no charges, except for a few special items. There are no insurance qualifications. But it is not a “charity”. You are all paying for it, mainly as tax payers, and it will relieve your money worries in time of illness.

The National Health Service was introduced in Britain by a Labour Government, very different to the Labour Party of today, responding to pressure from a working-class majority population, determined after the Second World War never to go back to the poverty of the 1930s. Today, nearly 70 years after the introduction of the British NHS, the Irish capitalist State has failed to introduce anything that might compare with it. Here, with a health service which prioritises treatment for those who can pay and which dumps thousands of patients on trolleys in overcrowded emergency departments each winter, the State struggles to even provide free GP care for all of its under-sixes.

In what direction does the Fine Gael Government now aim to take the nation's health services? The programme for Government tells a tale. First it will seek to progressively dismantle the HSE. Second, it will seek to establish hospital trusts with stand-alone finances and third, it will open the door to private finance for sections of hospitals and to outsourcing to private companies. In other words, it is a programme of creeping privatisation and the continuation of neoliberal policies in the Irish health services.

The Minister praises the idea of a ten-year plan but if it is to be a ten-year plan going down the Fine Gael road that would be a disaster. On the other hand, if it was a ten-year plan which started by breaking with the current health care model, quickly establishing an Irish national health service, and then strengthening it progressively through the years, that would be something very different. In concrete terms, what would that mean? It would mean the State becoming the provider of the health care needs of all. This would be funded from a pool provided by the taxpayer within the framework of a progressive taxation system. There would be free GP care for all, free dental care for all, free access to good mental health services for all, free operations and hospital care, and free prescriptions at the pharmacy. In other words, there would be genuine universal health care, free at the point of use.

The Minister charged with overseeing the introduction of the NHS in Britain, Nye Bevan, said:

The National Health Service had two main principles underlying it: one, that the medical arts of science and of healing should be made available to people ... irrespective of whether they could afford to pay for them or not [and] the second was that this should be done not at the expense of the poorer members of the community but the well-to-do.

That is the way it should be done here. The introduction of a 2% millionaire's tax would raise €2.7 billion, enough to reverse all of the health cuts of recent years; a 10% increase in the effective rate of income tax paid by the top 10% of earners would raise the same amount again; and to cut corporate welfare by just 10% would raise another €1.5 billion. That would provide nearly €7 billion with which to kick-start an Irish national health service.

The Institute of Obstetricians has recently expressed concern that the National Maternity Hospital will be governed by St. Vincent's Hospital when it transfers to the St. Vincent Hospital's campus. St. Vincent's is owned by the Religious Sisters of Charity, there are nuns of the board of directors and doctors must sign contracts promising to adhere to the religious ethos of the hospital. For example, St. Vincent's prohibits female sterilisation as it conflicts with that religious ethos. This is a disgrace in a modern health service in a modern state in the year 2016. Hospitals funded by the taxpayers must be owned, controlled and run by the people, in other words they must be State-owned and democratically controlled.

Hospitals funded by the taxpayer should not be run by religious orders. We are for a national health service in this country but this can only work in the context of a genuine separation of church and State.

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