'The Minister for Health is coming! We must prop up the illusion. We must enter a great lie'

The Minister is coming. And we have stepped into a Soviet-era farce. HSE apparatchiks will appear, and the Minister will be ushered down freshly painted corridors that are not jammed with trolleys, chairs, wheelchairs, beds.

The Minister’s nostrils will not encounter sickness. He must not know that the painters worked around trolleys and chairs and beds as well as around the clock.

The Minister is coming. And he will be ushered down the newly painted corridors to the shiniest, newest wards only.

The battle lines are daily drawn between management and front-line staff – the well-paid people who plan and the poorly paid who are "tasked"

The Minister is coming, and we must protect him. We must prop up the illusion. We must enter a great lie. So he can believe the words that will issue from his mouth when he talks to the cameras: efficiencies, targets, winter initiatives.

The Minister is coming and the walls are painted, and the corridors will be empty of chaos, and the doors of the dilapidated wards, like our lips, will be sealed.

Targets will be met and everything is wonderful, comrades; everything is working perfectly – we are all pulling together, harmoniously.

A divided place

Except we aren’t. We are being pulled apart. This public hospital is a very divided place. The battle lines are daily drawn between management and front-line staff – the well-paid people who plan and the poorly paid who are “tasked” – that’s one of their words: they mangle language as well as dreams – to carry out the plans, even when it is as plain as s**t on a shovel that the plans cannot work.

The apparatchiks appear on the ward from time to time. To monitor. To count heads and beds. To take aside a clinical nurse manager or, better still, a nurse with just a year’s training who has suddenly been left in charge, and put pressure on them.

To free up space, to discharge still sick and recovering patients, to shove them where there is no oxygen point, no privacy, no dignity.

The “apps” appear, mangle language, impart their managerial wisdom, and disappear.

There is nothing bloated or excessive about my salary or those of my colleagues

What remains is another illusion, because their inflated salaries are conjoined with our miserly pay to paint a picture of bloated excess.

Let me be clear. There is nothing bloated or excessive about my salary or those of my colleagues. An intern earns €9.49 an hour (a pay rate that increased from €6.49 in March 2016).

‘Legally responsible’

During my internship, for less than a tenner an hour I was legally responsible, according to my contract, for all my decisions about patients. There is supposed to be a fully trained senior nurse, or preceptor, by my side. In reality, more often than not, there wasn’t. That in itself was incredibly stressful.

In a hospital corridor sits a hoist, for lifting patients. It needs a service. Whose job is it to organise this? Nobody knows. It is another Great Hospital Mystery. But sure can’t the nurses get together and lift? Literally pull together as a team?

I see the strain, the stiffness and the defeat in colleagues. I refuse to get used to this

In this divided world reality is also fractured. You pass a broken piece of essential equipment and you get used to the idea of it, sitting there, redundant. But you do not get used to the idea of using your body in a way that is bad practice. My back hurts. I see the strain, the stiffness and the defeat in colleagues. I refuse to get used to this.

But when disinformation becomes the norm, when the farce acquires a grotesque reality as well as a vocabulary of its own, when 80-year-olds are left overnight on trolleys like human detritus, when a nurse has one thermometer for a ward of 30, something gets broken inside that worker.

Divide and conquer. There is the divide, promoted so casually, between the public and the private. More subtly, there is the ranking of various elements within the public service. Gardaí, teachers, nurses.

Somehow, unlike gardaí and teachers, we are seen as slightly less than essential

Recent research indicates that most people want nurses to be paid more. But when pay restoration for nurses is placed in the context of essential services being threatened, that public support wanes. It has always been so.

Somehow, unlike gardaí and teachers, we are seen as slightly less than essential. Yes, citizens will want to pay us more when they, or people they love, are under our care. But the sentiment fades fast.

And sure isn’t it a vocation, and aren’t they all lovely girls and boys – angels, really?

I am feeling distinctly unangelic. I am angry. I need to eat and pay my share of the rent. And put petrol in my two-decade-old Fiesta. And I would like to buy shoes, or go to the cinema without feeling I am being indulgent.

But the Minister is coming, and the walls are painted, and the shiniest wards are waiting. The cracks have been painted over. The hoist has been hidden from view. Perception is reality. The system works, comrade. The system is not broken.

The author's identity is known to The Irish Times