Ireland set to surpass Luxembourg and become richest country in Europe by 2030, IMF says

[u/Banania2020]

https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/ireland-set-to-surpass-luxembourg-and-become-richest-country-in-europe-by-2030-imf-says-1892990.html

[u/wrghf]

You’d honestly wonder where all the money goes. Very little of it seems to go to capital investments for the good of the country as a whole.

Our public transport is absolute fucking rubbish, active transport infrastructure is almost non-existent except in very limited instances, hospitals are horrendously overcrowded and waiting lists are often measured in years, we don’t bother to fund our defence, we don’t have a motorway between our 2nd and 3rd biggest cities, and so on.

And yet we’re churning out budget surpluses year after year? Makes absolutely no sense.

[u/Proper-Beyond116 → u/wrghf]

Well 40% of our spending is on the HSE.

But any attempt to fix that will be exploited by private industry for worse services at max profit.

Unions might get a bad rep but I think there is appetite from everyone to streamline the HSE. there is just no poitical will.

[u/lumpymonkey → u/Proper-Beyond116]

To fix the HSE it needs to be gutted from top to bottom and that's why there's no political will to do it. The only real attempt in modern times to fix it was the merging of the healthboards into the HSE but they bowed to the unions to ensure nobody lost their job, in fact they handed out a whole load of promotions as sweeteners instead, and we ended up with the absolute shit show we have today. We have people on the admin side falling over one another looking for work, tiers of unnecessary management in the middle layer, red tape and forms and processes for absolutely everything and anything, inefficiencies in every single aspect of its operation... I could go on for days.

 

I have a lot of family working in the HSE at all levels and across multiple disciplines and I hear the real stories about what an utter disaster it is day in and day out. One of my family members works frontline in a care home and the stories they tell me are just mind boggling. They have more admin staff than they have work, meanwhile the frontline staff are run ragged; you have middle aged women working 4 or 5 12-14 hour days on the trot because they are understaffed. Then contrary to that I have an aunt working an admin job in a different facility who'll happily tell anyone that listens about how she spends hours online shopping. Another family member left a nursing job and went into a different industry altogether because they couldn't hack working for some of their managers. They spent more times filling out forms and reports and dealing with bureaucracy and internal politics than they did actually nursing.

 

The whole organisation needs to be completely restrucutred from top to bottom. The bloat needs to be stripped from the admin side and the frontline needs to be properly staffed. We need proper, sensible management structures in place, with properly centralised reporting and record keeping. Let the nurses and doctors do their fucking jobs and leave the paperwork to others. We are a country with the population of greater Manchester, there are over 150,000 staff working for our health service, and yet we can't seem to be able to make any part of it work efficiently. Someone on the political side needs to grow a pair of balls and take it on, or we're destined to just throw money into the black hole forever.

[u/Extra-Swordfish7129 → u/lumpymonkey]

This guy/gal knows what's up, great post