Madasm, - Your columnist Noel Whelan is right: there should be cross-party support on a health service strategy - but which strategy? Fianna Fáil won the 2002 election on the promise of 3,000 extra hospital beds which, by broad agreement, were considered necessary. On Mary Harney's arrival in the Department of Health, two years later, we were told these extra beds were not necessary. Then we were told that maybe 1,000 extra beds were necessary but these would be for-profit beds.
Where is the strategy on which we are supposed to have a consensus? According to Ned O'Keefe TD, the Government's health policy can be summarised as "confrontation, privatisation, and Americanisation". Is this what Noel Whelan wants a consensus on? - Yours, etc,
JOHN WILLIAMS, Kilkee, Co Clare.