Debate contribution: Waiting Lists: Action Plan

Debate contribution by Mr Gerry Carroll on 20 February 2024.

MLA

Mr Gerry Carroll

Party at the time

People Before Profit Alliance

Date

20 February 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Waiting Lists: Action Plan

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4380743

Read the official Assembly record

Text

A lot of people, health workers in particular, will see today's motion as an admission of guilt from those who have gutted our health service. Three parties from the current Executive — the DUP, Sinn Féin and the UUP — have held the health portfolio for the last decade, and all three have overseen the growing waiting lists, unsafe staffing levels and attacks on health workers' pay. I will emphasise workers' pay, because we cannot hope to deal with waiting lists unless we pay health workers properly. We need to pay them properly so that we can recruit and retain staff in our health service. We need to pay them properly because they deserve it. They deserve to be able to provide for themselves and their families. They deserve it, because it is their self-sacrifice that has kept our health service afloat in the face of Stormont's negligence. It is not by accident that there are thousands of vacancies in our health service. Those vacancies exist because successive Health Ministers have cut health workers' pay in real terms and funnelled money away from our health service and into the private sector. I stress and emphasise that the Minister should immediately move to bring private health facilities into public ownership in order to help to tackle the waiting lists.

I agree with the sentiment of the motion, but the sentiments ring hollow when they come from parties such as the DUP and its Executive colleagues. Health workers, like all public-sector workers, are tired of their performative nonsense. They are tired of listening to politicians who bemoan the skyrocketing health waiting lists while implementing the cuts that fuel the same crisis. People who are languishing on health waiting lists not only want their concerns to be heard but action to be taken to deal with them. We are under no illusions about the Tory Government. They have no interest in protecting our health service. They have stripped it of resources time and again. Indeed, Tory policy is the greatest threat to public health on these islands. As far as I can see, the problem is that, instead of standing with our communities and challenging that policy, parties here followed the Tories into the mire, time and again. They accepted the Tory logic that there is no money for our health service and implemented some of the most brutal cuts in accordance with that warped logic. Worse still, the parties here accepted the Tories' supposed solutions, which are no solutions at all. While refusing to invest in public services and public-sector workers, they handed record sums to private agency firms and private healthcare facilities that are profiting from the mess that Stormont made. They surrendered domiciliary care to the private sector, which provides 80% of domiciliary care, giving it carte blanche to exploit health workers and to bleed the public purse dry at the same time. I would love to say that those are things of the past, but, between last night and, probably, later today, the Executive parties will have rammed through another austerity Budget, with no qualms, no scrutiny and no opposition from the so-called official Opposition. Make no mistake: the Budget Bill that is likely to be passed today will add to the waiting lists that the Executive claim that they want to address. I wonder whether the Executive parties truly believe their own propaganda or are deliberately trying to deceive the public. I will leave it to health workers and others to decide, but they should know this: the conversation is taking place primarily because 170,000 public-sector workers took strike action more than a month ago and demanded a pay rise and investment in our public services. Junior doctors are already prepared to strike over the pitiful sum on offer, and I fully support them. It is unfortunate that those life-saving workers have been forced to take strike action on the picket line, but that is the surest way for their demands to be delivered. If the Executive are intent on cutting services, adding to waiting lists and impoverishing public-sector workers, they must be met with an organised response. That includes workers taking strike action.

696 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 09:40 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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