Council seeks HSE meeting over future of Westport nursing home

Council seeks HSE meeting over future of Westport nursing home


Neill O’Neill

WESTPORT Town Council will look to meet with executives from the HSE to demand answers on the fate of the town’s MacBride Community Nursing Unit (CNU). The moves comes after the recent suspension of day services at the nursing home.
Speaking at  the monthly meeting of the local authority, Cathaoirleach Michael McLaughlin outlined the reason given for the suspension: staff being off sick and not being replaced due to the HSE embargo on recruitment.
Cllr McLaughlin called on his colleagues around the table to unite and demand that the HSE redeploy other staff to Westport so that day-care services could resume as soon as possible.
However, Cllr McLaughlin clashed with Cllr Christy Hyland, over the issue of sick leave in the public service. While stressing that he was not referring specifically to MacBride CNU, he said sick leave was being used in some sections of the public sector as extra holiday time by workers, something he said made any business ‘impossible to run’.
This prompted Cllr Hyland, himself a former garda detective and state employee, into a robust defence of public sector workers, many of whom, he said, are overworked, underpaid, subject to cut after cut and getting ‘mighty fed up’.
Cllrs Margaret Adams and Brendan Mulroy both said that the MacBride CNU was deemed secure last year and that the latest cuts were the ‘start of a slippery slope’.
Cllr Martin Keane had a cut at HSE management, saying he supported the proposal to speak with them, but that did not expect to ever be told the truth by them.
Cllr Ollie Gannon defended Minister Ring’s performance on the facility, saying that not long ago there was a lot of scare-mongering on the MacBride CNU by another organisation, but Michael Ring intervened in relation to that.
Cllrs Myles Staunton and Tereasa McGuire urged their colleagues not to wait until September to act on the issue, and they all agreed that they would make themselves available to HSE management any time to discuss their concerns.