Emergency general surgery left Enniskillen in December 2022, weeks after Stormont fell and with no minister in post to answer for it. Nearly four years on, the Trust says outcomes improved, its own consultants dispute the figures, and the regulator has quietly reversed the recommendation it once called urgent.
The overwhelming majority of police officers are decent, courageous public servants — but a small minority exploit the trust and access of their uniform to prey on vulnerable women seeking help. Rooting them out demands better vetting, sharper supervision, a properly focused Police Ombudsman, and a whole-system commitment to ensuring those entrusted to protect victims are worthy of that trust.
During a week dominated by Jeffrey Donaldson’s conviction, a quieter story slipped past: the Irish Government’s Shared Island Initiative passed €1 billion in commitments to 2030. From a Stormont cricket ground to a sub-two-hour Belfast–Dublin train, it revives a pragmatism that runs from Seán Lemass straight to Micheál Martin: cooperation without precondition, benefit without constitutional strings. The question now is whether Northern ministers will become active partners or passive recipients.
Data is not a mirror. It does not simply reflect reality back at us — it selects, frames, and in doing so, inevitably excludes. The most powerful use of data is not confirmatory but exploratory: the patient, unglamorous work of tracking real changes in real communities, driven by genuine curiosity about what’s happening rather than what we hope or assume to be true. When data is used to justify decisions already made, it stops being a tool for understanding, becoming …
Oops. The phone rang on Tuesday. “Mr Boal, have you been using your CPAP machine ok?” Yes, I had. To my astonishment, as I mentioned in my last article, CPAP has been grand, because I do have sensitivity issues. However, my sinus pauses hadn’t stopped. I definitely had sleep apnoea, but it wasn’t the only thing happening. The pacemaker was back on the agenda again, and this is where it gets good. Really good. Friday I got a letter in …
The last time I drove a car on the public road was a year ago yesterday, on my way home from the MOT in Ballymena. To celebrate, I had a piece of my birthday cake when I got home, and promptly choked on it. Life was a lot simpler in 2024. As far as I knew, the only things wrong with me were high blood pressure and a bit of hay fever (and to this day, these are my only …
A couple of weeks back, the sixth Northern Ireland Executive released its draft Programme for Government. Coming over six months after the Executive was formed in February, following a gap in office of around two years, a naive observer might have had high hopes for this document, especially given that, during the election campaign in 2022, most of the parties talked up a good game about getting the government up and running. The UUP manifesto said : it is vital …
My Dad died two days before Christmas. I was on my way up to see him when I got a missed call and a text from my brother telling me he’d passed away. He had pancreatic cancer. The time between diagnosis and death is often short. Before you’ve had time to wrap your head around the fact that your loved one is ill, they are gone. The shock of the loss is as sharp and painful as the grief. How …
A couple of years back, I was chatting to a friend of a friend who is a GP. Like, I suspect, most of us, I had (and still have) a fairly limited understanding of the nuts and bolts of how healthcare is actually provided in Northern Ireland, and he spent a bit of time explaining it to me. I was quite surprised to discover, for example, that GP surgeries are actually private businesses. They’re almost exclusively organised as partnerships, a …
Isolation and loneliness amongst older people are serious problems that worsened during the pandemic. While people are living longer, often this involves one partner surviving the other. Sometimes the result can be not only unhappiness, but also additional pressures on GPs and hospitals, as the person has nowhere else to turn. Loneliness has such far-reaching consequences that the health impact is comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, according to one study, and is associated with an increased …
Women in Northern Ireland are twice as likely to be murdered as a result of domestic violence than in the other UK nations. In some years, almost half of Northern Ireland murders are connected to domestic violence. In the 2022/23 year, of 17 homicides there were eight that resulted from domestic violence against women. Northern Ireland is also an outlier in international terms. While Finland has the highest rate of femicide by a partner, Northern Ireland is joint second with …
Only the most devoted conspiracy theorist could deny climate change given the devastating events of recent weeks. Spring was marked by deadly fires in Canada, terrible floods in Northern Italy and even an unfamiliar heatwave in Northern Ireland. Now things have got even more deadly, with awful new fire outbreaks in Greece, Italy Algeria and Tunisia. And a severe worsening of ice melting in the Antarctic. Meanwhile, the drought and loss of agricultural land in the Horn of Africa is …
As the finale event of the Docs Ireland film festival, boxing legend Carl Frampton and comedian/presenter Patrick Kielty had a one-to-one conversation with an audience of over a hundred at the Cineworld complex, interspersed with clips from their documentary films and interviews with others on the topics of Northern Ireland’s contentious past and outlooks for the future. The first clip was from Frampton’s “Men in Crisis”, where his interviewee Ryan (22:54) discusses his emotions in dealing with the suicide of …
With 66% of population of the UK and Ireland overweight or obese and the national Health Services all too aware while largely ignoring this fact, we are facing into a significant public health crisis that is already with us. Wygovey is a medicine everyone knows, or will know soon enough, and is being promoted as the panacea for our corpulence and being identified as a game changer. Wegovy is the most famous medicine we don’t have. Yet in the absence …
Keir Starmer, preparing for office, is setting out his stall on policy and last week addressed Labour’s plans for the Health Service which essentially means England as Health is devolved. But any policies by a UK government at Westminster will affect us here if only in future Health Service investments and policy direction. The current health service, which for us includes social care, seems insatiable when it comes to funding so throwing money at this problem alone is not going to …
Just five miles from Derry’s city centre, on the suburban edge of the Waterside, is the site of one of the worst environmental crimes in UK history. It has been described as Europe’s largest illegal waste dump, which may be an exaggeration, but it is certainly one of the very biggest. The Mobuoy waste dump runs across both sides of Derry’s Mobuoy Road. It covers 116 acres and contains one million tonnes of illegally buried rubbish. While the company running …
Our health service continues its bleak journey to hell in a handcart. The latest death by a thousand scalpel cuts is the news that they are cutting 300 student nurses places. You can guess the reason – budget cuts. I can hear you thinking, hold on a minute do we not need MORE nurses? Why yes indeed you would be right. We have almost 3,000 vacant nursing posts in the health service in Northern Ireland. If the health service was …
Criticising the NHS and promoting private health care as the answer has been in the news recently. According to the chair of the Royal College of GPs in Northern Ireland there has been a “significant rise” in patients having their “health needs met in the private sector”. Considering how bad the queues are for some treatments by the NHS, this is not surprising. When you see a relative in significant pain for well over a year with no end in …
With the morning mist still lingering over east Belfast, the Northern Ireland Assembly met at noon. The first item of business was – as always in this long series of recalls – the election of the Speaker and (at least two) Deputy Speakers. Letters from Speaker Alex Maskey ahead of the sitting had reminded MLAs that their order, language and debate should be constructive and that Points of Order should not be abused. Many MLAs walked down the steps into …
The failure of healthcare information support systems to provide a fully integrated and portable digitised personal medical history to aid healthcare professionals in making timely and efficient diagnostic, treatment and care decisions has become an open sore in Irish society, leading to much public debate. I felt moved to share my experience of such systems in the Irish Times: A chara, – Nearly 20 years ago I was asked to review the implementation of a digital patient record system at …
