Dáil Sketch/Miriam Lord:Granny was so sick she had to go to hospital. With each passing hour in the crowded A&E department, she felt increasingly alone and frightened. All she wanted was a bed.
How she dreamed of hearing those words that would end her torment. Granny cried for joy when finally, through the din, they came. "Let me through, I'm a statistician!" The strange world of the Irish hospital was sketched by Bertie Ahern for his gloomy colleagues and an incredulous Opposition during a dispiriting round of leaders' questions yesterday. Patients trapped in casualty wards will take comfort from wherever it comes, but things have come to a pretty pass when hope springs, not from a doctor with a stethoscope, but from a number-cruncher with a clipboard.
On the Dáil's first day back after the Christmas break, the Taoiseach was well aware he would face a grilling over waiting lists, cancelled operations and bed shortages, and arrived well prepared. He had a sheaf of files as long as a consultant's public patient appointments diary, and dived into them for cover as soon as the first question was asked.
Under constant bombardment from Enda Kenny, Pat Rabbitte and Joe Higgins, Bertie burrowed deep into his briefing notes and stayed there for the duration.
The Taoiseach, sighing deeply at the Opposition's refusal to accept his assertion that "massive improvements" are taking place, quoted HSE figures with abandon. He took exception to Enda's charge that he was massaging those figures to make Mary Harney look good. But as he spoke, you could almost smell the aromatic oils as he kneaded the statistics this way and that.
"Our figures differ a little bit," he murmured to the Fine Gael leader, slathering on some oil of HSE spin as he tried to pummel away at the huge list of cancelled elective operations. But as he did so, Bertie had to concede that appointments for surgery are being routinely abandoned so that patients marooned in A&E can take up the beds.
The Opposition howled as it became apparent that the Government's attempt to iron out the controversial casualty department bulge has merely resulted in shifting the problem somewhere else.
Bertie did his best to talk his way out of this slimming knickers approach to managing the health service. (The slimming knicker is a tortuous undergarment that flattens one part of the body, but the excess flesh has to be pushed somewhere. At best, it's only a temporary solution.) In response to claims of 40,000 abandoned appointments he argued: "I don't think there were any operations cancelled. There were operations postponed." This is due to enormous pressure on A&E departments.
"One serious road traffic accident, one serious operation, one infection at any time can create serious difficulties," explained the leader of one of the world's richest nations. He sounded piqued when informed that five years ago, his Government promised 3,000 extra hospital beds.
The people who were waiting list five years ago for surgery are not the same people waiting now, he said. People will always need operations. What is he supposed to do? More beds, screamed the Opposition. More beds.
Which brings us to his solution to the growing crisis. "Bed capacity for the country is being professionally undertaken by the HSE and statisticians to see what that figure is." Joe Higgins wasn't impressed by talk of another survey. "Pathetic . . . Have they been asleep for the past several years?"