Crises we’re facing are a legacy of no investment during the ‘lost decade’
WE ARE some way away from getting used to writing the digits 2018, as the new year struggles towards a greater semblance of post-festive normality.
But other things are unreassuringly the very same in the dreary realms of Irish health and housing.
People who are sick wait on hospital trolleys in all-time record numbers – and half a year after we were promised homeless people would no longer be accommodated in hotels, they remain in hotels in great numbers. No surprises about what our political resolutions for this new year should be.
We simply must see houses, social and private, provided in great numbers. We also need to end the sense of political hopelessness that surrounds our rolling health crises.
In better news for this young year of 2018, we find that economic recession is now over and our “lost decade” has at long last come to an end.
But it remains a very sobering thought to reflect that even in the midst of the darkest days of the recession in 2012, with record unemployment then above 15pc, there still were fewer children in homelessness and in poverty than there are today, over five years later.
There were also fewer people on trolleys and hospital waiting lists in 2012.
But we must not be too downcast since unemployment is expected to be around 5.4pc in 2018; we have some 2.1 million people at work; and, fuelled by strong growth, the national economy is pretty much in the black.
All of that is scant consolation to the person waiting on a hospital trolley for medical care.
It is also pretty wearing for anyone trying to get a home amid soaring rents and a continued pattern of rising house prices, when the best news on offer is the rate of increase is tapering off.
In many ways, the problems we face are a legacy of no investment in the years of economic bust, and new demands for services prompted by the return of better times.
We need targeted investment and rigorous implementation of careful planning.
Last October, the Government signalled a determination to make inroads into those problems of trolleys and waiting lists in its 2018 health budget. But the €471m extra capital spending for the coming five years looked weak as the Department of Health had argued just a few weeks earlier that an extra €2bn was needed.
The Government earmarked €55m for more patients on waiting lists to have care via the National Treatment Purchase Fund and €37m is to be used to tackle delayed hospital discharges.
Health Minister Simon Harris already had serious problems with these issues last winter. Now things show all signs of worsening, with mutterings of a rise in flu cases. Short-term fixes are no help.