Pour aul Robbie Butler. Well respected as one of the nicest men in politics there were concerns that he would be completely out of his depth as Health Minister and so it has come to pass. Less than a month into the job, he has pulled a Father Ted and announced yet another review into health services.
You might recall me writing about this when Peter Weir was Education Minister. Baron Weir of Ballyholme decided rather than take any useful concrete action on the issue of educational underachievement in working-class protestant boys he would instead commission another report on the subject to add to the 7 existing reports that we already had on the issue.
This reminded me of the speed episode of Father Ted, the one where Dougal is trapped on a milk float rigged to explode. While brainstorming ideas to save Dougal one of the priests utters the immortal line ‘is there anything to be said for saying another mass?
Nothing says “I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing” like calling for an external advisory panel. In a way I don’t blame the guy. The Health Minister is probably the most complicated job in Northern Ireland. Our health service is astonishingly complicated with thousands of intricate parts. As minister there are thousands of levers you can pull, but the problem is none of the levers have labels. Every time you pull on one lever it affects some random part somewhere else. You can sugarcoat it and say it does make sense to listen to the experts but the criticism is that it’s just kicking reform further down the road.
Reaction to the news has been met with weary indignation, from the BBC:
Prof Heenan said: “If there’s a difficult decision, order a review. And quite frankly, we’re now in the realms of farce.”
“We absolutely do not need another review. We absolutely do know what we have to do,” she said.
She added: “We continue to delay. We continue to have consultations. We continue to appoint experts.”
Dr Alan Stout, who chairs the British Medical Association’s (BMA) Northern Ireland Council, said the establishment of the new committee had come as a surprise.
“We actually haven’t been consulted on it or it hasn’t been discussed with us before,” he told BBC News NI.
“There is a real scepticism that the last thing that we need is yet another committee, more reports and more evidence, whenever we have a wealth of evidence, a wealth of reports that are telling us and have been telling us for 10 years what we need to do.”
He said the committee can not be “another layer of review” at a time when “definitive decisions” needed to be taken quickly.
“We are seeing massive problems right across our service, right across every trust, every hospital, general practice,” he said.
“We’re seeing transformation by collapse at the moment.”
The DUP’s health spokesperson, Diane Dodds, described the creation of the advisory committee as “can kicking for political purposes”.
I really do feel for Robbie. He’s been dropped into an impossibly complicated role and the poor guy is going to get the absolute political sh*te kicked out of him over the next year by all sides. The only bright note on the horizon for him is that the way it’s looking, Stormont will possibly be collapsed in the next few months, thus giving him a handy exit.
Managing Editor of Slugger O’Toole. I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism; I am not a member of any political party. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.
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