Letters to the Editor: People with cancer deserve the best possible chance
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This is an open letter to An Taoiseach Simon Harris regarding underfunding of the National Cancer Strategy.
As cancer doctors and researchers, we are writing to highlight the impact that lack of investment in the National Cancer Strategy is having on people with cancer in Ireland.
The strategy, which you published as minister for health in 2017, has the potential to significantly improve Ireland’s cancer outcomes through investment in cancer prevention, detection, treatment, and survivorship supports.
However, it has only received proper funding in two of the seven budgets introduced since then. As a result, while some improvements have been made, the National Cancer Control Programme has not been able to fully deliver on its ambition.
Screening has not been expanded as planned. Target waiting times for cancer tests are not being met. Cancer surgeries are frequently delayed due to shortages in staffing, beds, and theatre space. Investment in infrastructure has been lacking, despite increasing infection control issues and rising cancer incidence. Radiotherapy services are operating significantly below capacity. We are falling far short of the already modest target of 6% of cancer patients participating in clinical trials. Ireland is also one of the slowest countries in Western Europe to make new medicines available to public patients.
Our healthcare staff do everything they can to minimise the impact of these deficits on patients. However, it is simply not possible to provide optimal care or patient outcomes in these conditions.
In 2023, the European Cancer Inequalities Register (a collaboration between the OCED and European Commission) published a country profile for Ireland. This showed that in the most recent year for which data is available (2019), Ireland had the third-highest cancer mortality in Western Europe.
Given the impact of covid-19 on Ireland’s cancer services and the Government’s failure to provide any new recurrent development funding for the National Cancer Strategy in 2023 or 2024, we have no reason to believe the situation has improved. Rather, given the pressure our services are currently under, Ireland’s cancer outcomes are at risk of going backwards.
People with cancer in Ireland deserve the best possible chance of surviving the disease and enjoying a good quality of life afterwards. This will only be achieved through properly resourced cancer services, with protected pathways that are not disrupted by other pressures on the health service.
We urge you to reverse the decision to provide no new recurrent funding to the National Cancer Control Programme in 2024 and to commit to sufficient ringfenced multiannual funding to enable full delivery of the national cancer strategy 2017-2026.
Last week, the Seanad returned for just one day, following a three-week break.
The 34-page order paper for the Upper House of the Oireachtas for Thursday included almost a dozen pages of important legislation ranging from family courts reform to a bill on adoption tracing information, and much, much more. Yet only one piece of legislation was discussed.
The order paper also included motions for debate from September 2023 right through to March 2024.
Unlike TDs, senators do not have geographic constituencies. They do not represent a specific county, but rather the entire country. There is no need for them to hold constituency clinics or attend the opening of a new road in the town where they live.
In February, all sitting senators, without exception, took a standard allowance for their travel — an additional payment on top of their salary. Some picked up €1,456.25 for the month, while others pocketed as much as €3,663 just to travel between their home and Leinster House for 23 days of the month.
The question must be asked — what are our 59 senators doing that they need a three-week break followed by a one-day working week? In fact, their standard
working week is usually only three days.
While senators also sit on Oireachtas committees and do important work in that respect, committee work cannot be the obstacle that is preventing them dealing with the lengthy backlog of legislation on the Seanad Order Paper.
For the €76,329 annual salary a senator is paid — plus the many allowances they collect — the Seanad should meet five days per week, for at least six hours per day, and do the work senators are paid to do, rather than the work they wished they were paid to do.
One solution to the morally unacceptable sidelining of non-Catholic schoolchildren during religion classes in Catholic ethos schools could be if each of these non-Catholic schoolchildren were each given regular opportunities to contribute to such religion classes by their expressing freely their own thoughts about their own religion before the whole of their class?
But if any of such non-Catholic schoolchildren don’t belong to any established religion, then they should be facilitated to express freely and at ease their own thoughts, if they so wish, on the meaning of life in general before their whole class?
This solution could help empower non-Catholic schoolchildren to be better at public speaking and to also help them attain a clearer moral purpose to their lives. It could also empower Catholic schoolchildren too by their learning, at first hand, something important about other faiths and other belief systems which are different to their own.
Since the two main Palestinian factions don’t recognise each other and actually loathe each other, I doubt that much will be achieved by Ireland’s recognition of a Palestinian state.
Palestinian leaders have a long history of rejecting all offers for the establishment of their state. If it ever does happen, the chances of Gaza and the West Bank separating from each other and going the way of West and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) are very high, and in far less time.
Colin Sheridan’s article on turf-cutting is typical of the nostalgic and emotional cover-up of the reality of this issue that needs to be challenged — ‘Bogs, Brussels, and birthrights: Cutting turf is not just a right but a religion in rural Ireland’ (Irish Examiner, April 8).
The number of people cutting turf by hand in Ireland is tiny, and has been for decades. Turf-cutting is a commercial business carried out by contractors using heavy machinery. It is highly destructive and wasteful.
Contractors aren’t motivated by ‘religious’ or poetic feeling about the bogland, much less any concern for keeping their neighbours warm. Their motivation is simple — greed. To make a profit regardless of the social and environmental costs to everybody else.
This is what turf-cutting has been about in Ireland for many years now.