Attempts by Minister for Health Mary Harney to recruit new consultants to the health service on terms that have not been agreed with the consultants' representative bodies will fail, the Irish Hospital Consultants' Association (IHCA) said yesterday.
The IHCA and the Irish Medical Organisation have informed medical bodies representing doctors in other countries that the contracts on offer for the new posts have a number of shortcomings and they should advise their members not to apply for them.
They say the new consultants will be "gagged" and will not have the right to speak out if services are not up to scratch.
Former IHCA president Dr Josh Keaveney yesterday described the salary on offer for the new jobs - which would be up to €205,000 per year - as "Mickey Mouse". He said people in the US were making $500,000 (€368,000) a year.
However, Finbarr Fitzpatrick, secretary general of the IHCA, said the main issue was not money. He said this issue received little attention at the consultant contract negotiations, which have now broken down.
Some 50 of the new consultant posts, which the unions plan to boycott, are due to be advertised tomorrow by the HSE.
Mr Fitzpatrick advised potential candidates to "take the long view which is that sooner or later, and it may well be later, there will be an agreed contract hammered out which will be to their advantage".
The IHCA will hold an extraordinary general meeting next Sunday at which it will make a formal decision to boycott the recruitment process. They are also likely to stop doing administrative and managerial tasks in hospitals from Sunday in protest at the posts being advertised without agreement.
IHCA president Dr Mary McCaffrey claimed many of the posts about to be advertised have not been adequately resourced and that if anyone applied for them they may end up frustrated, unable to do their jobs as a result of lack of resources. Junior doctors in a number of specialities, including surgery, orthopaedics and anaesthetics, have already made it clear they will not apply for the new posts.
The talks' chairman, Mark Connaughton SC, said in a letter to unions and health service employers yesterday that he was "taken aback" at the IHCA's withdrawal from the talks on Monday. However, he said he recognised the consultant organisations' objections to the Minister's decision to proceed with the advertisement of the new posts.
But he said there had been many weeks of discussion with substantial consensus on a variety of issues and that "it would be a great pity if the parties did not continue to attempt to build on that consensus".
"It appears however that I may have little further to contribute to the process . . . it may be that discussions will resume on a different basis and in another forum," he continued.
Ms Harney said last night the money on offer to new consultants was not "Mickey Mouse".
"We are offering to pay consultants €205,000 plus a 20 per cent bonus . . . for anybody to describe this is as 'Mickey Mouse' is incredible," she said.
She said if the consultants' bodies tried to veto consultants coming in from abroad that would "damage patients and subvert the will of the Government".
She added that there was no question of gagging new consultants and said she had brought in provisions to protect whistleblowers in the health service.