Huge support for nurses
The 26-Counties is now locked in the grip of a major industrial dispute, which sees 28,000 nurses on strike and normal patient care reduced to a fraction of its normal level. The vast majority of the public are solidly behind the nurses in their action.
The nurses' strike is the most recent example of the major inequalities which exist in the much vaunted `Celtic Tiger' economy and more specifically, it is the result of the inequality and lack of support given to the health service by successive Dublin governments.
The back-slapping hypocrisy of establishment politicians, technocrats, business leaders and certain journalists, all of whom continually boast of the success of the Irish economy, has been exposed.
In the context of health professionals, nurses' earnings are relatively low and their working conditions poor. But the plight of the nurses is more than matched by the scandal of other extremely low paid workers across the state.
The squalid reality of the Celtic Tiger is low paid workers, an underfunded health service, underfunded public transport, house prices out of the reach of ordinary citizens, a chronic shortage of local authority housing, a rampant heroin crisis, rural poverty and environmental deprivation in urban working-class areas.
Those who are producing the new wealth in this still rapidly growing economy are not sharing in its benefits and are being screwed to the wall under the cover of something called `Partnership'.
The strength of all workers lies in unity and nurses, ultimately, should unite with all those hundreds of thousands of workers on whose backs the fallacy of the Celtic Tiger is constructed.
The government has no excuse for its failure to address the issues behind the nurses' strike, which was a long time coming.
It was nurses who were forced to implement savage health cutbacks imposed by the government in the 1980s and to witness the results of hardship and worse on patients. The extent of corruption among Irish politicians in that era is now coming to light in the various tribunals. That reality partly explains the deep and widespread support for the striking nurses.
It is to be hoped that the solidarity and support shown so far towards the nurses will continue and that for the sake of patients as well as nurses, their action results speedily in a just resolution.
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