Sinn Féin to outline health policy at Castlebar meeting

Anton McNulty

Sinn Féin TD Pearse Doherty is among those who will address his party’s public meeting on health care in the Welcome Inn Hotel, Castlebar, at 7pm this Thursday. Sinn Féin is expected to outline its policies on health care ahead of the General Election, and examine the impact on cutbacks in Mayo.
Transplant surgeon and former Dublin All-Ireland winner Dr David Hickey will be a guest speaker. Dr Hickey, who won three All-Irelands as part of the great Dublin team of the 1970s, is also the founder of the national pancreas transplantation programme. A prominent health campaigner, he will discuss the success of the Cuban health system and ask why Ireland has not employed an equivalent model.

Vested interests
Mayo General Election candidate, Rose Conway-Walsh has said that successive Irish governments’ health-care policies have led to inequality in the system.
“We have had years of right-wing policies in the health system which have favoured privatiation and centralisation and looked after the vested interests. Fianna FΡil cut thousands of beds while Fine Gael have also continued to cut beds. We have a situation where there are theatres ready to do operations but there are not enough beds in the system,” she said, adding that their policies have seen cancer services moved away from Mayo to Galway.
Cllr Conway-Walsh said the current policies have resulted in a people making a lot of money out of the health system and these vested interests do not want the system to change. She said unless there is a change to the health policies, the crisis in the health system will continue.“The impact of privatisation means that the more you can afford the more you get, while people who do not have the money have less access. People need to reflect on the health policies of the established political parties and examine how we got to such a crisis in health care … if they continue to vote for these parties, things will not change … You cannot expect to get different results by doing the same things,” she said.

Venue clash
The local Fianna FΡil party has also booked the Welcome Inn on Thursday night, it has emerged. Whether that party’s launch of Cllr Lisa Chambers’ General Election campaign will cause a collision course is a matter of speculation, since neither party is prepared to budge.
Fianna FΡil leader Michéal Martin is scheduled to arrive at the Welcome Inn Hotel just as Sinn Féin’s public meeting on health is set to get underway.
Reportedly, Fianna FΡil is expecting a bigger crowd than may have been anticipated, due to what one party insider described as ‘annoyance’ over the clash.