Tipperary councillor claims local TDs are 'tightlipped' on hospital overcrowding

Tipperary TDs have been branded as being "tightlipped" over the crisis that is hitting hospital services in the Mid West, with day care surgery cancelled in Nenagh Hospital this week due to the overcrowding in University Hospital Limerick.

Nenagh-based Cllr Seamus Morris said that there was pandemonium going on at the moment due to the collapse of our emergency services in the country and the incredible suffering it has caused to patients and Hospital workers alike, with condemnation from all sides, including unions, and incredibly, at long last, “former” consultants in emergency medicine.

"But our local TDs who have mostly served in previous Government remain tightlipped, hoping, perhaps, for the disgraceful scenes at out emergency departments to disappear or become so normalised that the outcries will only happen when someone dies on a trolley," he said. 

However, Cllr Morris said that there was there was a reason why local TDs remained tightlipped.

"All of those who have served in Government in the past have become embedded in the 'de-nationalisation' of public services, or as it is commonly know as the 'privatisation agenda' which follows the Thatcherite agenda of breaking up the public sector and breaking unions so loved by the IMF who made it part of the IMF bailout package gobbled up by Fianna Fáil in Government after they drove the economy over the cliff yet again," said the Independent councillor.

Cllr Morris said that in order to make privatisation work public services had to be run into the ground and the system went from 23,000 hospital beds in 2000 to 14,410 in 2020 while private hospitals sprung up all over the country.

"The same has happened in housing where 35,000 homes were sold by NAMA to vulture funds at a 70% discount while county council CEOs were told to stop the building of social housing," he said.

And he warned that water was next to be privatised, with water infrastructure being underfunded while the new vehicle (Uisce Eireann) to privatise another public service was being readied with several pieces of legislation going through the Dáil "without a whimper from our local TDs".

"The incredible suffering inflicted on our hospital-going public (and their workers) has been plotted for a long time by several Governments, aided and abetted by most, if not all, our TDs in the Mid West. That’s why they are hiding at the moment," said Cllr Morris.