Public deserve more detail on new health service structure

So, Taoiseach Enda Kenny owns a house and an office in Mayo, an apartment in Dublin - and a field at his parents' house. We learn all this courtesy of a national newspaper which deemed it important enough to splash it across its front page. The Bull McCabe must be grinding his gums in envy. This is the new transparency and we had better get used to it. We don't know if the paper used the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act to extract the information. If it did, it is a legitimate way of making our leaders more accountable. Better than a tribunal and a battalion of lawyers, and cheap at the price. Whether we think the information gleaned from the newspaper's enquiries is trivial and not really worthy of our attention, or a blazing headline, is neither here nor there. The principle of a demand for openness in public life has been established beyond doubt. Secrecy about public affairs in Ireland is only recently deceased. The FoI legislation was enacted in 1997, sweeping away years of closed doors between State and public. And the State - of course - then decided that too much information was not good for us and brought in an amendment to the original legislation, putting restrictions on the right to access certain information. However, we shouldn't quibble. But for the Freedom of Information Act, we might never have learned about the appalling abuse of children in care. I raise the issues of secrecy and transparency in the light of Minister for Health James Reilly's recent announcement of a shake-up of the Health Service Executive (HSE). It seems to me that this move is surrounded by an inordinate amount of secrecy. This is part of the content of an RTE report in December: "The Cabinet has approved radical changes in the running of the Health Service Executive. Its existing structure is to be scrapped and replaced with a seven-member directorate. The seven directorates will be hospital care, primary care, mental health, children and family services, social care, public health and corporate services. "One of those individuals will act as director-general and it is proposed that the positions will be filled from within the existing HSE structure. Minister for Health Dr James Reilly has said that legislation to abolish the agency will be brought forward shortly. Dr Reilly said the changes pave the way for the introduction of universal health insurance." Since then, not a word. No information on exactly how the new organisation will differ from the HSE, no information on how it will differ from the original eight (or was it 12) regional health boards. And certainly no information on how the Cabinet came to its conclusion that the HSE should be scrapped. No input from those most likely to be affected by the changes, the taxpayer. No wonder the SIPTU trade union has called on the minister to set out his plans. We, the great unwashed, want to know exactly how this new organisation will function. As it is, the minister has enough advice to go on in charting a new path for the health services. Last August, the HSE's head of child and family services, Gordon Jeyes, described the culture in the HSE as "appalling", adding that a textbook could be written about the executive. "If it was possible to get it wrong, they got it wrong," he said. The minister agreed with him, although not in similar trenchant terms. "The large corporate structure in the executive is dysfunctional, and has been for some time," Dr Reilly said. SIPTU's health division organiser, Paul Bell, said the minister needed to let the various stakeholders know of his plans for replacing the organisation. Dr Reilly has put it about that he is a radical and reforming Minister for Health. He now has the opportunity to put his mark on a health service that is so obviously creaking. But he can only do it if he brings the rest of us into his confidence.