Nurses scared of the flu jab? They’re in the wrong job!

I WAS listening to Siptu’s divisional organiser, Paul Bell, on Newstalk’s Pat Kenny Show trying to defend health workers such as nurses from being compelled to take the flu vaccine while working in our acute hospitals.

One of the reasons he gave for nurses not being vaccinated was that ‘they might be afraid of needles’. Another was ‘the vaccine was not 100% effective against all flu’. It seems for Siptu and the INMO, the least of their concerns is for the sick patient who might contact the flu from one of these health workers and perhaps suffer serious consequences as a result.

As for nurses who are afraid of needles and don’t believe the health experts about the flu vaccine, they are obviously in the wrong job.

DENIS DENNEHY, Dublin.

...YET again we see another Minister for Health squirm in midwinter as the underfunded HSE struggles to cope with the annual mid-winter surge in illness.

Every year we hear from Ministers of Health that they are on top of the job or that they have a new report to present that will solve the issue.

This year we even got an apology from our current Minister for Health, Simon Harris, about the shocking hospital overcrowding.

Surely this annual increase is predictable, can be planned for and can be managed with consideration for the dignity of these unfortunate patients?

Yet, despite its predictability, Simon Harris’s priority is not the unfortunate citizens stuck on trolleys for seemingly endless hours.

No, our Minister for Health’s priority is to introduce an additional burden on our underfunded, under-resourced and broken health service.

His priority seems to be to add in excess of 5,000 abortions per annum to our already overstretched hospitals.

CATHERINE TREACY, Castletroy, Co. Limerick.

Good health!

READING Roger Lewis’s article (Mail, Friday) about returning to drinking alcohol after six years of abstention, I was somewhat alarmed.

I also almost died from alcohol abuse like Roger Lewis and would not advise anybody who’d had such an adverse reaction to excessive alcohol use to either continue or return to drinking.

Unlike Roger Lewis, whose illness was physical, I suffered mental, emotional and spiritual illness. I started drinking alcohol aged 14 and only stopped under duress from a family member at 31.

Yes the road to recovery has been long and arduous and required a few hospitalisations, talk therapy and psychiatric treatment spanning 30 years.

During this time I have also had some marvellous times, travelling the world meeting all sorts of interesting people, having a variety of challenging jobs and most of all eventually regaining my 13year-old bright intelligence and learning to fit in again with the world, still as an individual!

Of course everyone has free choice but I would not relish a descent into the state I saw today of a very young man drinking a can of lager while standing outside a shop begging for money. NAME AND ADDRESS

SUPPLIED.

No money for Martens

IT’S an absolute and utter disgrace that Molly Martens should inherit one cent from the house where she and her father murdered the man that originally purchased that property (Mail, Monday).

She shouldn’t be entitled to anything.

Jason’s children and family should get full proceeds from his inheritance, irrespective of what his will read, as those children have to be educated, not to mention the legal fees the Lynch family have encountered.

It disgusts me to see that woman getting one brown cent.

K. COTTER, by email.