Sir, – Your lead stories on Friday, Saturday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday dealt with the non-disclosure by RTÉ of payments of €345,000 to Ryan Tubridy.
You allocated far less and far less valuable real estate on page four of Wednesday’s paper to Paul Cullen’s report that the HSE is on course to run up a deficit of €1.6 billion this year despite receiving a record €21.1 billion in this year’s budget (News, June 28th). That puts its estimated 2023 spend at €22.7 billion.
We hear much about our windfall corporation tax receipts. The yield from corporation tax in 2022 was €22.6 billion. As the American cousins like to say, do the math. And when the various committees, accountants and corporate governance experts have done with RTÉ, perhaps they might take a look at what is going on in our public health service.
Domhnall McGlacken Byrne writes (Letters, May 27th) that our approach to funding our public health system is akin to pouring money endlessly into a leaky bucket. He points out that we get a bad deal – compared with people in other countries of similar wealth, we pay more and get less.
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Of course he is quite correct to say that we must try something different. Our political leaders cannot continue to believe that the solution to the truly appalling service offered to those relying on our public health system is to throw yet more money at it. We have tried that year after year with the usual results.
Our very well-funded public health system should be offering a decent service to the people of this country. But I fear our unproductive allocation of tens of billions of euro each year means that we are now reaching the stage of having a self-serving health bureaucracy with a country attached.
In Capitalism 4.0 Anatole Kaletsky wrote of the NHS: “The dark, almost unmentionable, secret that will haunt British politics is that the National Health Service has become an incubus, sucking the life out of all other public services which have to be starved of funds to meet the insatiable demands of the NHS.”
We are well down that road. – Yours, etc,
PAT O’BRIEN,
Rathmines,
Dublin 6.