It's a good trick, if you can manage it. It presupposes a certain doziness on the part of the general population, a criterion which we in this country appear eminently capable of satisfying. The question was how to reduce hospital waiting lists, writes Mary Raftery.
These had been a major bugbear for successive governments, and had even been credited with losing Fianna Fáil an election or two. The solution was bold and imaginative. Simply stop recording them. If nobody counts them, then they cannot be reported. They will have vanished. Hey presto! No more waiting lists in the new Irish health utopia.
Breda O'Gorman should really be told this. The fact that she has had to wait over six months for an operation to control the extreme pain which she suffers as a result of her multiple sclerosis is clearly an illusion.
What she needs is a simple procedure to insert a pump which will deliver pain killers to the appropriate site. She will then be able to receive physiotherapy. Since Christmas, the agony has been too severe to allow even this, and Breda is deteriorating fast.
The 3,133 children waiting for a psychiatric assessment - assessment, mind you, not even treatment - should know better. Some of them have been waiting for up to two years. But, of course, they are not really on a waiting list.
We don't do waiting lists in Ireland any more.
Those waiting for rehabilitation services, 245 at the most recent count, some of them for up to three years, will doubtless be cheered by Mary Harney's recent statements that our long waiting lists have gone away. Likewise for the 200 patients awaiting urgent neurosurgery treatment, some of who are critically ill.
Similar patterns exist for orthopaedic procedures and for cancer treatments.
Last week's European Health Consumer Index report, produced by a Swedish-based organisation, looked for a while as if it might burst our happy little bubble. It compared a range of consumer-oriented health indicators across the EU. Incomprehensibly, Ireland came out second worst.
Thankfully, Mary Harney was able to clear up the matter for us. The figures used in the EHCI report were all out of date, she explained.
They clearly came from a time when we used to record silly things like waiting lists. Don't these Swedes understand that now that we've stopped doing this, everything is much better?
The Minister for Health tells us that these days no one in Ireland waits for longer than three months. The brilliant new National Treatment Purchase Fund sees to this. It is an ingenious mechanism of funnelling public money into private hospitals to allow patients to be treated there at the taxpayers' expense.
God forbid that we should use the money to invest in our public hospitals. When we did that, we used to have waiting lists, after all.
Incidentally, this same National Treatment Purchase Fund is also the body charged with drawing up overall national statistics on waiting lists. But since we don't have any, it of course does not waste its time doing this. It simply chirrups away about what a great job it does.
By highly convoluted and elaborate extrapolations of what paltry figures have managed to survive the cull, it has been estimated that, in reality, over 29,000 patients are on waiting lists for hospital treatment in this country. But we have no way anymore of knowing how long people have been waiting, or how many people die untreated.
Just like we are not allowed know how many people die of MRSA. Officially, no one really does. They die of other things, or of the great catch-all known as "complications".
The innovative approach to solving the problem of hospital waiting lists by the simple expedient of ceasing to record them, is a measure we are likely to see expanded to other areas as a general election approaches.
But there is no reason to confine the success of such a brilliant measure to health alone.
It is surprising that no one has thought of this before. And it is no accident that we have the Progressive Democrats, the brainiest party in Ireland, to thank for it. We know already, for instance, that in the Department of Justice they have attempted something similar by playing fast and loose with the mechanisms for accumulating crime figures.
They should really cut out pussy-footing about and just stop recording crime altogether. Then we wouldn't have a problem, would we?
Pollution could vanish in a similar way, carbon emissions would become a thing of the past, a distant memory of the bad old days when we foolishly measured these phenomena. Climate change would merely mean Ireland becoming a sun destination for foreign tourists.
Poverty also would no longer be with us. Nor would obesity or diabetes. But why stop there? Why not abolish death itself? The possibilities are endless. Why have we never thought of this before? In truth, we must all really be dozy. Except for the PDs, of course.