Madam, – Conor Lally (Home News, March 30th) reported the Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern as stating that “Ministers and the Taoiseach have taken [cuts] way in excess of anyone else in the public service. ” Mr Ahern should know, and Minister for Health Mary Harney knows full well, that this is simply not true. Hospital consultants who signed the much trumpeted new contract have suffered higher, and in many cases much higher income losses.
These losses have a dual origin, namely the failure of the Minister and the HSE to fully honour the terms of the new contract and, in addition, the general pay cuts in the public sector. In the most extreme example an income cut of 30.24 per cent has been imposed – and this is before the pension and other levies are applied.
A further perverse result of the clumsy way the contract cuts have been implemented is that some consultants who are allowed private practice are now paid more than some who have sacrificed that right!
It should be remembered that there was considerable moral pressure placed on consultants to sign the new contract in order to allow the necessary reform of the health service. Those individuals who did sign the contract (the considerable majority) seem to have been uniquely penalised, some of them even when compared to the Taoiseach who has suffered a much lauded cut of 20 per cent.
Mr Ahern should perhaps choose his words more carefully and Ms Harney should reflect on her failure to honour the spirit of a contract that she was so insistent on implementing. – Yours, etc,