Sir, – The outgoing Government has struck a deal with our private hospitals. It is costing an estimated €115 million per month.
That is public money. The same money that pays for coronavirus tests and personal protective equipment.
Our caretaker Government has ordained that the arrangement must be kept “confidential”. There is no good reason for shrouding such a gigantic transfer of public money to private commercial entities in secrecy.
Especially when the medical consultants who staff these hospitals and actually make these hospitals work have not yet agreed to work within the contractual framework our caretaker Government has committed the public purse to paying for.
I hope it all works out – and soon. But at the moment it looks like an omnishambles, and an outgoing Government with Ministers who do not even have seats in the Dáil should be treading more carefully.
At the very least the Irish people should be told exactly what our caretaker Government has committed us to pay for.
I, for one, am very uncomfortable with a caretaker Government pouring enormous sums of public money into private commercially constituted hospitals with little transparency and almost no parliamentary oversight. – Yours, etc,
MICHAEL DEASY,
Carrigart,
Co Donegal.