Anyone who has read the Lisbon Treaty from cover to cover should wear their achievement like a badge of honour. Taoiseach Brian Cowen was honest enough to admit he hadn’t read all of it, while businessman Ulick McEvaddy admitted he couldn’t read it at all. You’ll know the feeling if you’ve tried. Occasionally, the masses [...]
In the first of two articles, Kealan Flynn outlines a number of important principles that should underpin the process of drawing up the new community pharmacy contract. The tendency of any military is always to fight the last war. The biggest danger for the community pharmacy sector is that it will allow the row over [...]
Kealan Flynn on how Garret FitzGerald’s criticism of Ireland’s public administration, and its handling of the health sector, highlights the need for reform of the Health Service Executive. It has come to something when a former Taoiseach publicly derides the quality of our public services and administration, and directs such a frank and forthright attack [...]
Kealan Flynn writes about the possibility of developing comprehensive electronic health records in the future. Healthcare systems and services across the developed world have had mixed success with the introduction and application of information and communications technology. The landscape is littered with the corpses of costly, high-profile failures. PPARS, the ill-fated project for modernising health [...]
Kealan Flynn writes about the continuing dispute between community chemists, the HSE and the Minister for Health, which may yet trigger a mass exodus from the GMS scheme. In the Roman world, the most infamous of the Ides fell on the day in 44 BC when the emperor Julius Caesar, having summoned the Senate but [...]
With 71-year-old Arizona Senator John McCain and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney locked in a battle for the soul of the Republican party and little more than a hair’s breadth between the Democratic party’s front runners, all eyes are now on ‘Tsunami Tuesday’, when upwards of twenty states hold their primaries. The four leading candidates [...]
One of the most prominent but least-reported elements in Finance Minister Brian Cowen’s Budget speech is his stated determination to insist on better value for money through improved delivery in the public services. The value for money issue rarely gets more than a passing mention in the media. Most journalists don’t have the time or [...]
Rather than addressing the core issues, which a relatively unknown journalist raised in her book and television series, the media (broadcasters in particular) opted instead to line up, much like the characters in Murder on the Orient Express, each taking his or her turn to plunge in the dagger. One of the most disappointing aspects [...]
In the late 1980s, when Ireland had a straight choice between reining in the public finances on its own initiative, or allowing the International Monetary Fund to do the job for it, one of the quieter line ministers met serious resistance to the spending cuts from his most senior civil servant. Sensing the threat to [...]
PPARS, it will be recalled, was the high-tech, high-spec replacement for the health boards’ creaking payroll, personnel and scheduling systems; a massive project in which computerisation across the health service was to be linked with radical change in management at every level within it. It was the health service equivalent of Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ [...]
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