The anger felt by doctors on the picket line has been "exacerbated" by the Minister for Health's "gravely inaccurate and misleading" statement to the Dáil on the current public health doctors dispute, the Irish Medical Organisation said yesterday.
Mr George McNeice, chief executive officer of the IMO, sent a letter to the Department of Health yesterday in response to Mr Martin's statement in the Dáil on Tuesday.
Mr McNeice said the Minister's statement was "clearly based on an incomplete understanding of the background" to the dispute.
The IMO is calling for a full implementation of the Brennan review, payment of salaries for specialists equivalent to those of hospital consultants, payment of salary arrears since 1994 and the introduction of a properly structured out-of-hours system.
Mr Martin said on Tuesday that the IMO had lodged a 30 per cent pay claim in addition to increases of up to 14 per cent and a 7 per cent increase to be paid under the terms of the new national pay agreement, Sustaining Progress.
"This is untrue," Mr McNeice said in response. He said that the IMO had a long-standing claim for consultant status to be accorded to directors and specialists since 1990.
Mr Martin also mentioned in his presentation to the Dáil that the IMO had rejected a 25 per cent increase before the strike, inclusive of increases under benchmarking and Sustaining Progress.
Mr McNeice denied these increases had been rejected by the IMO as they had "not been presented to the organisation" because the benchmarking body decided "it was not in a position to decide on appropriate salary levels for the the doctors because of the ongoing Brennan review".
He added that the figures mentioned by the Minister in his statement had "no relationship to the organisation's claim" and the decision to publish such misleading information had "exacerbated the anger felt by doctors".
Criticising the Department of Health's handling of the dispute, Mr McNeice suggested the Minister "consider whether any other group has been ignored for the best part of a decade before engaging in strike action".
He said that given the "appalling mismanagement of this dispute over such a long time, where the Department has firstly refused to attend conciliation and then presented with no proposals", the 270 public health doctors and the IMO "cannot be accused of rushing to the barricades".
The Minister's repetition of the Health Service Employment Agency's suggestion about the ethical, professional and public safety issues of the strike was "particularly unfair and unwarranted", Mr McNeice said.
He called the Minister's presentation "seriously flawed" and "extremely sinister in view of the extent to which so many factually incorrect statements have been read into the record of Dáil Éireann".
A Department of Health spokeswoman said Mr Martin will respond in full today to the issues raised in the letter. "He will stand over all his Dáil statements and will reject any suggestion that there were inaccuracies and would once again urge the IMO to return to the Labour Relations Commission," she said.
IMO industrial relations director, Mr Fintan Hourihan, said he would wait and see what the Minister's response would be today.