Minister of State for Health Brian Lenihan was heckled when, in his address to the annual conference of the Irish Nurses Organisation in Cavan yesterday afternoon, he referred to Government plans to allow the building of private hospitals on the grounds of public ones.
When Mr Lenihan said Minister for Health Mary Harney, for whom he was deputising, was "encouraging the private sector to invest to create new public beds by moving 1,000 of the existing private beds out of public hospitals", delegates in the packed conference hall started saying "no, no, no".
"Well, I'm telling you what the policy of the Tánaiste is," Mr Lenihan responded. Appealing to the 400 or so delegates in attendance to bear with him while he explained the move, he said: "The key objective, of course, is to ensure that public beds are used for public patients."
Madeline Spiers, who was re-elected INO president for a second year, told delegates in her address, which followed that of Mr Lenihan, that the INO was particularly concerned at increased privatisation in the health sector. "We do not want it to happen," she said.
She added that while Ms Harney did not have time to attend the INO conference due to another commitment, she had over the past year found the time to promote, whenever possible, the growth of the private healthcare industry.
Ms Spiers said that comments made by Ms Harney earlier this year to the effect that if theatre nurses didn't take so many tea breaks more patients could be operated on, were "mischievous, disingenuous and hurtful", as well as being untrue.
She said nurses' pay and conditions had to improve if the State was to be able to hold on to its nurses.
"In the past six year we have lost over 9,000 Irish-trained nurses and midwives," she added.