The tremendous clarity of the nurses’ strike

THEY love talking about the HSE. If you want to be regarded as a serious person in this country — maybe even serious enough to be on The Marian Finucane Show — you need to be able to talk in an apparently authoritative way about the HSE.

You need about two minutes of uninterrupted talk for your opening statement, and then you need to have a few extra bits and pieces to contribute when the chat has reached its natural conclusion — which has been unofficially estimated to occur after about four minutes — though that doesn’t stop them talking for at least 25, because that is what they do.

And while there is no formula for success in talking about the HSE, best practice suggests that you must frame your thoughts in such a way that none of this talking will make any material difference whatsoever to anything.

Moreover, always bear in mind that this is not about the HSE, as such, it’s just about you talking about the HSE — “for your sins”, as you might quip good-naturedly.

So when a nurses’ strike arrives, to the people who talk about the HSE, it may seem like some eruption of wild emotion in an otherwise highly controlled environment — controlled by people like them, who can see the “big picture”.

Except they are not seeing the big picture, they are not seeing anything, or doing anything, except talking about the HSE.

So we are hearing a lot about the “emotive” aspects of the dispute, how everyone thinks that nurses are great, and will support them, or at least will sound their horns as they drive by the picket line. But it is not really “emotive”, and to some extent it’s not even about nurses at all.

Yes, even the folks sounding their horns because they were at a party in a flat full of nurses in Ranelagh in 1979 are making a comment about something that is even bigger than the HSE — if that is possible.

They know, in a way that even the people who talk about the HSE do not know, that the modern world is broken. And that one of the most obvious ways in which it is broken, is that the wrong people have most of the money. So rather than being “emotive”, there is in fact a tremendous clarity that comes into view, when we are faced with something as perfectly illustrative as a nurses’ strike.

We are not just saying that “nurses are great” — we are saying that there are loads of great people who are being paid half-nothing, while the proverbial hedge fund managers, or even HSE managers, are being paid shed-loads.

The recent story about the world’s 26 richest people owning as much as the poorest 50pc is a pretty obvious indicator of the general corruption of man — but it would not be so bad if those 26 people were to include, say, Sir David Attenborough. Or a great writer. Or the footballer Roberto Firmino. Or even a couple of spectacularly successful nurses.

People tend to be extremely fair about these things — we base our assessments on the principle that if a person is extraordinarily good at something, ideally something that is of benefit to other people, let them have all the money that it is feasible for them to receive. And more if they can manage it.

You want nurses to be paid more? You know what? I would go so far as to suggest that doctors should be paid more — or at least I would have no objection if they managed to raise their stipend by another few hundred grand, again guided by the principle elucidated above.

Indeed, it is most unfortunate for those who argue for a “responsible” attitude, while they’re talking about the HSE, that this strike has come with the realisation that the Children’s Hospital will cost… whatever it will cost, when this traditional incineration of the public monies is done.

To argue that there is not enough money to pay nurses is simply to misdiagnose the situation, when there is so much money to be mismanaged, almost for the sake of it.

You might even say that the mismanagement of public money has reached a fetishistic level — that the perpetrators must be getting a perverse kind of buzz out of it, and that when eventually they start hitting numbers like €2bn, they will see the Rapture.

There is almost an artistic statement in the idea that the mismanagement of public money is itself a lavishly rewarded occupation — and we understand at some visceral level that the people who are actually good at things like, say, nursing, are by dint of their goodness restricted in the pursuit of all that money.

They are just too busy, their services too much in demand to be dedicating themselves to the quest for executive-style remuneration.

The striking nurses stand in defiance of that twisted corporate culture which has diminished us all. And we know it.

Now, as I was saying there about the HSE...

‘There is almost an artistic statement in the idea that the bad management of public money is itself a lavishly rewarded occupation’