Sir, – Concern about top-up payments to medical administrators has nothing to do with gender as Dr Emer Ryan et al claim (November 26th).
We already note from your columns that the male CEO of the country’s biggest paediatric hospital, Our Lady’s Hopital Crumlin, is paid less than half the salary commanded by the female Master of Holles Street. Attempts to muddy the water by claims of an anti-female doctor agenda is risable, even if it does come from “young female trainee doctors” from Holles Street, as they describe themselves.
The issue is transparency on public sector pay and how we share the austerity burden across society. If we demand that patients and low-paid care assistants take the brunt of the cuts in the health sector then we should at least expect the senior management to be seen to shoulder their share – all the more so when the public purse is doing the paying.
As citizens, we feel horribly let down when we see politicians and the privileged elite greedily reward themselves while demanding that we live within our already reduced and meagre means. Ministers, senior civil servants, lawyers, bankers and even the church have shamefully let us down.
Public morale and social cohesion simply cannot accept the spread of greed and self-interest to those charged with caring for our sick and vulnerable. How can someone surviving on invalidity allowance of less than €200 per week comprehend, never mind accept, how someone on €4-5,000 per week should want to take even more.
Privileged young doctors, trained and maintained at enormous public expense, need to stand back from casting themselves as victims of the media and threatening to emigrate. It is time they answered John F Kennedy’s question about what you can do for your country and not what your country can do for you. Medical consultants, hospital managers, State-funded agency and “charity” administrators should ask the same question. – Yours, etc,
MICHAEL ANDERSON,
Moyclare Close,
Baldoyle,
Dublin 13.