Time to go back to teaching, Mary

"Only two" people have been misdiagnosed in the Tallaght X-Ray scandal where thousands of X-rays are in a backlog, unreviewed because of a lack of radiologists at Tallaght. They won't be reviewed until May, and until then, thousands of women who may have breast cancer will go untreated.


Only two, the words uttered by our forever tactful Taoiseach as he tried in vain to defend the Minister for Health at the Dáil on Wednesday. Only two people, one of which is dead and the other of whose health hangs severly in the balance.

 Of course, the Minister herself, who knew about this for a long while, was nowhere to be seen, conveniently on another excursion - this time to New Zealand.

This will round the number of her nice little "fact finding missions" off to roughly 16. Between 2006 - 2008 she worked up a hefty little bill of €750,000 of our money using the government jet.

That's only the jet. Not to mention the FAS scandal she was involved in in recent years where she had a grand old time getting her hair and nails done (not much good it did her either).

Personally, I am totally with Enda Kenny and Eamonn Gilmore and probably with the rest of the country in asking - when the hell is she going to get sacked?!

Not only is it madness to have a non healthcare expert as the Minister for Health (how on earth a secondary school teacher is meant to know anything about running a country's healthcare I'll never understand) but she's making a complete mockery of her post.

Imagine that €750,000 pumped into hiring radiologists for Tallaght. One person would not be dead, and another couple of thousand would be currently recieving treatment for their breast cancer, or would have the assurance of knowing that they are perfectly healthy.

I think people's lives are far, far more important than getting your hair done and going to the superbowl, but I guess that's just me, I'm not a TD.

If this happened in most other countries, she'd be out on her ear. I think it's so sad we just sit back and allow atrocities like this to happen to a country with a healthcare system so severely messed up.

If she, or Fianna Fáil, had any wish to stay in government or secure people's votes in general, they would seriously want to get their act together.

RP