Dr. Mary Ryan is a consultant working in hospitals in both Limerick and Kilkenny. She recently told Tipp FM that Ireland needs to pause accepting migrants and refugees because the health system cannot cope.
Dr Ryan said that there was a risk of “giving a bad service to everyone” when the system becomes overloaded, and called for a “pause” in accepting refugees because the system was so far behind, especially after major delays in screenings and treatment for cancer as a result of the Covid lockdown.
“There is a backlog in diagnosis … about 1 in 2 people are going to be delayed in diagnosis and treatment,” she said, pointing out that “we need to get on top of what we have.” Catching cancer early was key, the consultant pointed out.
She also told Tipp FM that the refugee crisis was compounding the crisis in the health services. “We have 62,000 [extra] people in,” she said, adding that a “helicopter view” was needed to assess what the country can deliver, or the crisis would get worse while the health service was “back peddling”. “There is no point giving a bad service to everyone,” Dr Ryan said. “We have to look after our own people as well as refugees … but in order to do that we have to provide a proper service .. we should not provide a sham service.”
“We are welcoming the refugees and we are very good to them, all I am saying is we need to take a breather and do the helicopter view on what we have at the moment and how we can look after all those citizens Irish, Ukrainians, Syrians all of those who have come in, in the proper manner. We are already so far behind before we start taking more in.”
She disagreed with statements made by an Taoiseach who said that Ireland could not limit how many refugees came to the country.
“I didn’t agree with Michael Martin when he was saying they can keep coming, I can see services stretched. I am the doctor, I can see this,” she said, calling for a proper assessment by the government of what medical services the State was capable of offering.
Dr. Ryan told Tipp FM that many people in the medical field share her concerns about the overloading of the health service but they were afraid to say it.
“People have got to be not afraid to speak the truth,” she said. “For too long in this country people have been afraid to voice their opinion. They were being controlled – that’s not democracy, democracy is speaking honestly and truthfully.”
“What you are doing is to try and help people, you’re trying to make sure you look after what we have. And by all means when we have looked after what we have then open the doors again, open them, but for God’s sake get on top of what we have and make sure you can look after all the citizens who are sick disabled and need treatment, particularly cancer treatment.”
The presenter, Fran Curry, said that he thought Dr Ryan’s words were “powerful” because he knew a GP in a local village who had been already inundated with patients – and “another couple of hundred refugees were imposed on top of that for him to look after”
The conversation is an important one because it highlights the reality of what happens when the virtue-signalling of the government meets the actual ability of the state to look after its people.
The health service in this country has been mismanaged for years by the same politicians who are now insisting that Ireland – supposedly a sovereign nation – cannot cap the number of immigrants coming here. (They are conveniently ignoring, of course, that Ireland is taking far more per capita than many others in Europe, and that other countries effectively cap the number of migrants and refugees to a number they can manage.)
Dr Ryan is just the latest medical professional to speak out about the unsustainable pressures being placed on an already hugely-stretched and creaking healthcare system by a government who clearly do not have the interests of their own people as a priority.
In Killarney, Dr Gary Stack, managing director of SouthDoc, told Radio Kerry in October health that “everything will collapse” if the Department of Integration kept loading people into the town.
He said that the International Protection Accommodation Service (IPAS) failed to give notice to health services that 318 refugees were being sent to the town last week.
The doctor said that his staff “can’t cope” with providing services to the patients they have, after taking 150 new patients earlier this year when 1,000 Ukrainians were placed in Killarney.
The practice was at full capacity, he said, and it was upsetting for staff to turn people away.
“Killarney is not the place to open up what appears to be a new reception centre. It does not have the facilities they have in CityWest,” Dr Stack said. “We have to stop at this stage.”
“If we keep loading numbers in, everything will collapse.”
Meanwhile in Co Clare, back in May, Dr Margaret Fitzgerald, National Public Health Lead at the Social Inclusion Office, said that “there are 3,000 refugees in Clare. The GPs in Clare are under incredible pressure because there aren’t that many GPs in Clare.”
Since then, as we all know, the government has simply allowed the number of migrants and refugees to come here in ever-burgeoning numbers. In addition to over 60,000 Ukrainians, some 14,000 migrants – many who are from safe countries and are economic migrants, not refugees – are being housed in Ireland. As we now know, many of those migrants have destroyed their identifying documentation so that no-one knows for sure who they actually are.
But the truth is that the government has known for a long time that the huge surge in immigration would put the healthcare system under unsustainable strain.
Five years ago, rural GPs were warning that they were already at breaking point and would be unable to care for large numbers of migrants being placed in small towns. Nothing was done to ease that “massive strain”.
In fact, experts have been warning for years that Ireland faces a “crisis” in GP services because of the ageing profile of many family doctors and a reluctance in newly-qualified GPs to work in rural areas.
Now we are at the point where senior consultants are warning that the pressure on services is dangerous and that the crisis is going to get worse because tens of thousands of migrants and refugees are being loaded on a system that is already in chaos with massive waiting lists and a dearth of consultants.
Dr Ryan is also right that doctors and healthcare professionals are afraid to speak out about what is happening on the ground in the health service. After a week of the media’s carefully choreographed accusations against the people of East Wall, they may be further cowed, but that will simply endanger more patients.
Does the government even care? Or is its seemingly insatiable need to virtue signal to the world while ignoring the needs of its own people going to continue driving the increasingly unsustainable immigration policy in Ireland.