2 days ago
Public opinion is now toxic, warns former minister for health
People in
Northern Ireland
must wait 11 times longer than people in the Republic for urgent operations, yet the
HSE
gets no credit, a former minister for health has said.
Stephen Donnelly
said waiting lists in the Republic have fallen by 60 per cent over the last three years, yet few in the public know anything about it, or want to know anything about it.
'It is improving rapidly. They're doing incredible work. It's not all the way there, but it's moving really quickly,' the former minister told the Patrick MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co Donegal.
'It's hard to find another country in Europe that has achieved anything like that. Emergency department pressures are falling. Women's healthcare is being transformed. There's a lot of really good things happening now,' he said.
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'Don't get me wrong. Not for a moment am I suggesting that it's fixed, or that everything is right. It's not. I know it's not. But it's moving in the right direction so quickly that we are on track to have achieved universal healthcare within the next five years.'
Despite the improvements, the public narrative about the Republic's health system is 'a black hole', said Mr Donnelly, who served as served as health minister from June 2020 to January 2025.
'Contrary to the national view on this, we have a public health service that is improving at an extraordinary rate,' he said.
The negativity surrounding public attitudes towards the health service is typical of the attitudes towards nearly every other element of Irish public life, which is increasingly corrosive and destructive, said Mr Donnelly, who lost the seat he held for Fianna Fáil in Wicklow at the last general election.
'If we are to be serious about navigating what is an increasingly fractured and turbulent world, we're going to have to have a different conversation about who we are. We need to balance the conversation,' he told the summer school.
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'It's not that we shouldn't shine a light on the challenges that exist. Of course we should, we do and we must always do that, but we've got to start bringing some balance.'
Six months after he stepped down as minister for health, Mr Donnelly said: 'What strikes me is that the political debate has become harsher and harsher. You would be forgiven if you were watching a lot of TV for believing we live in a failed state.
'And we really, really don't.
Social media
has just gone completely off the reservation. Fourteen years ago when I was first in politics, it was fairly all right. People used it to put out their ideas and have chats. Now, it's just poison.
'There's lies and misinformation and hatred and racism and poison, and ... but it is being consumed all the time,' said Mr Donnelly, who was a Social Democrat TD before he joined Fianna Fáil.
Social media would have us believe that Ireland is in 'a state of perpetual crisis', he said. 'That the doctors and the nurses are all leaving. The teachers are all leaving. The young people are all leaving, or the Government is uncaring, incompetent and corrupt.'
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Foreign friends who have visited Ireland say they have heard nothing but complaints when they have travelled around the country for a week, he said. 'You meet them, and they just say, 'What is wrong with you people?''
Ireland does face some 'immense, some deadly serious challenges', but so does every other country, he said. 'The level of negativity that we see here is not normal. It does feel like there is something particular going on in Ireland at the moment.'
Ireland is 'incredibly well placed' to become a world leader in the use of artificial intelligence in healthcare, he said. 'There's a wave of innovation coming. Some of it's already here.'
