Should he fall, or will he be pushed?

So after last weeks debacle with Noel Dempsey and his little announcement over provisional licence holders not being allowed to drive without being accompanied by a full licence holder of more than two years, who thinks Mr. Dempsey should be asked to fall on his sword? Personally I think that he should made to jump on it, from the top of a very tall building! The mans career is littered with bad decisions during his time in office. We all remember his plan to reintroduce university fees, what a genius idea that was! If people were calling for his resignation over the Aer Lingus move from Shannon issue, then they should be demanding it now. The fact is that this latest announcement was simply a ploy by the minister to take peoples attention away from the Shannon move. This is more evident with the postponement of the decision until June (a move which people still argue is a mistake) it has given him some breathing room as nobody is asking why he did nothing about the Shannon move back in June of this year. Or why if as he claims it was not brought to his attention, why was it not brought to his attention. This argument in itself seems to be rather dubious to me personally, as I find it hard to believe that the civil servants in the department of transport failed to notify the minister. So this announcement should not be used to divert peoples attention, it should be used by the media and the public to show Mr. Dempsey’s incompetance as a minister, and it is just another decision in a long list as to why this man should not be allowed to hold office.

Are pharmacists only out to line their pockets?

Ok. So I thought it was about time I started writing on this thing, if not for any other reason then to get my own thoughts in order! So theres something thats been bothering me about this whole pharmacies withdrawing methadone prescription services from patients debacle. As we all saw yesterday the IPU announced that its members were set to resume the service, and don’t get me wrong this is a good thing. But my issue is why it took the threat of court proceedings and criminal action being taken against pharmacists in order to get them to resume filling prescriptions. The simple fact is that pharmacists have a duty to their patients and heroin addicts are arguably the most vulnerable of these. It would appear that pharmacists feel that they could exploit this group, a group who all have serious problems, not least of all that thy are addicted to such a vile drug. With the proposed cut in mark up by the HSE they felt that they could get away with the withdrawl of this service, an action of which the consequences they either did not consider or else they simply didn’t care! For example addicts would have to que at clinics in order to get their methadone, this would mean that the one’s who are trying to get their lives back together would have very little hope of achieving this. Simply because of the ques and the incapacitating nature of this treatment, it would make it impossible for them to hold any kind of employment. It would also mean that they would have to face the pushers and people they no longer wish to associate with in the car park, all because pharmacists refuse to take a price cut. This is an absolute disgrace that the pharmacists could consider such an action. While I may not be the biggest fan of the HSE either and it is clearly not without blame in this instance either it is good to see that it is taking measures in an effort to resolve this issue, quite an uncharacteristic step for the HSE. The IPU has however announced that its members will resume the service, although it did point out that it could not guarantee that all its members would, the ones that do resume filling prescriptions will now have backlogs to clear and so normal services will take a few days. So the greed of the pharmacists leading them to take actions which were not only being a futile exercise has done nothing except hurt the people the service was in place to help.

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