Madam, - Whoever thought up the word "co-location?" Co-location suggests that the poor and the well-off are to be treated in the same location. That is exactly, precisely and absolutely not the intention. The social dynamic is that the poor are to be corralled away from the wealthy. The rich are to be insulated from the arm-pits of the poor by lush green lawns.
The concept of co-location is a lie, loaded on the one hand with uncaring cynicism directed at the poor and, on the other hand, with tender regard for the investors who, though immensely wealthy, would prefer to be wealthier.
Mary Harney has designed this obscene social monument. And she will hand it down, as an inheritance for future generations, literally in stone. She has ensured that, with time, our major public hospitals will have about them an acrid smell, together with an unspoken but rigorously implied disparagement of poor people - once the well recognised stigmata of the workhouses of Ireland. - Yours, etc,
Dr CYRIL DALY, Howth Road, Killester, Dublin 5.
Madam, Fintan O'Toole (Opinion, June 12th) may or may not be right about the consequences of promoting for-profit hospitals on public hospital grounds, but his argument is fatally compromised by his blatant selectivity in marshalling evidence to support it. His implication that "company employees" cannot be "patient-centred professionals" is typically biased and derisory. By this measure, hardly any general practitioner in the country is a "patient-centred professional", since GPs are even more directly profit-motivated than company employees.
There are huge "eco-system" differences between the Irish and US healthcare systems, yet Mr O'Toole takes account of none of them.
I'm open to persuasion by cogent arguments on either side of the private hospital co-location issue, and your newspaper is a good medium for presenting them. Unfortunately, ideological polemics like Mr O'Toole's are neither enlightening nor persuasive, but merely profoundly irritating. - Yours, etc,
ENDA O'BRIEN, Aille, Barna, Co Galway.