The country cannot get out of the mess the health service is in without society deciding that it is going to invest more money in the system, according to retired cardiac surgeon, Maurice Neligan.
In his speech to the Céifin Conference on Reflecting on our Health Service, Mr Neligan said when it came to paying for the health service, people were good at talking about it, but slightly more reluctant to do anything about it. "It reminds me of an old African proverb which says: 'in the midst of your illness, you will promise a goat, when you have recovered, a chicken will do'."
He added: "We need 3,000 more beds or we are going to go nowhere."
Mr Neligan said resources in any health service should go first towards the patient, then the doctors and nurses and third the administration.
In the Irish health service, "we have reversed the order", he said.
Mr Neligan asked the audience of 500 people how many had private health insurance, and when the vast majority of people raised their hands, he said the response showed that "the State system isn't working". "Do we think the State should run the health service at all? It is not public versus private, it is a mixture of the two that creates the problem.
"Money should not be a debar of accessing treatment and that should be a basis, as far as I'm concerned, of a civilised society - your ability to access treatment shouldn't depend on your ability to pay.
"So we can continue as a deeply divided and unfair society or we change it, and the simplest way to change it is universal health insurance in which you will have to build in safeguards."
Mr Neligan, who writes a weekly column in The Irish Timeshealth supplement, said it was immoral and wrong for the HSE to be running down small hospitals without having in place the promised centres of excellence. "They are shutting the facilities with nowhere for these people to go. That is wrong and immoral and we shouldn't hesitate to say that."
Economics editor with The Irish Times, Paul Tansey, said poverty "remains a blot on the boom". Four out of five people in Ireland were comfortably insulated from poverty. A further one in 10 was economically vulnerable, and 9 per cent were living lives of quiet desperation, trapped in consistent poverty.
"The public resources earmarked in national plans appear wholly inadequate to tackle concentrations of multiple deprivation," Irish Timescolumnist John Waters told the conference.
