Eye on the Hill

Should I Stay Or Should I Go...

WELL would you Adam and Eve it, but the Health Minister Edwin Poots is in the eye of the storm once again.  

Last week parents of paediatric cardiac patients were up in arms over the potential end of such surgery in Norn Iron.  This week the children of the elderly are up in arms...

Yes, Transforming Your Care, the document designed to shape the way forward for our health service, had said that more elderly people wanted to be cared for in their own homes. So the health trusts promptly started announcing they would be closing their nursing and care homes.

Zimmer frames and walking sticks at the ready, the elderly began manning the barricades, ready to repel any demolition men, but allowing journalists through for interviews.

One journalist reported that an attempt was made by one pensioner to bite a manager in the style of Luis Suarez but their false teeth dropped out at an inopportune moment.

Minister Poots, in his softly spoken and eloquent manner, said handling of the announced closures had been a “disaster” and claimed that local health mandarins had “over-stepped the mark”.

D’Oh! As Homer Simpson might say... It was Minister Poots that said that publicly owned homes should close. It’s just that the boards were moving quicker than he anticipated.

At the same time, is there likely to be an increase in private care and nursing home provision? We’ll leave that as a rhetorical question for our readers to decide on...

Of course our health system has to change with the times, but we couldn't help but noticing that latest statistics clearly say that more people are living longer...which suggests that even if more people wish to stay at home longer, there will still be a rise in demand for places in nursing and care homes...

In just the same way that more babies are surviving with complex conditions – like cardiac problems – than ever before, one cannot help but notice that recent decisions suggest that statisticians in the health department were reading the wrong set of figures...

Breakdown services needed...

QUICK! Call the AA! We have a breakdown in our examination systems!

Yes, Norn Iron has spoken! We don’t want no truck with that revisionist A level nonsense. We like our A and AS levels just the way they are, and no tinkering thank you very much!

What this all boils down to is that in England, education secretary Michael Gove wants A levels back to the way they were when only Oxbridge candidates got the benefit of doing one set of examinations at the end of upper sixth.

Whether one believes Gove is a visionary, a true man of Middle England, or just plain bonkers, it is clear that his plans have gotten the thumbs down in Norn Iron.

A survey showed that most head teachers were strongly opposed to the plans from the Engerland education secretary and want things just the way they are.

Which means that if the change to Engerland’s A levels takes place in 2015, and presuming the land of tartan stays in the UK, there could be four separate systems for universities to assess before agreeing to accept the next generation of degenerates, sorry we meant students.

Will the Scottish highers be given the same weight as Norn Ireland A Levels, or will the Gove A levels trump them all?

Frankly, we think that education minister John O’Dowd is building a case for an all-Ireland examination system, which would at least have the benefit of being less complicated. Baccalaureate anyone?

Conservative, libertarian success...

CONSERVATIVES are not, as we write this, having a good day, except if you are conservative with a small ‘c’ and have a large UKIP rosette pinned to your lapel.

As we write this, we see that UKIP is gaining council seats across England, and even coming a credible second in the South Shields by-election . The coalition partners in the shape of the Tories and the Lib Dems have received an electoral bloody nose.

Of course this could all change, but it does signal a potential shift to the right in terms of Tory policy to regain ground from UKIP, before the next general election.

Of course, in Norn Iron UKIP MLA David McNarry must be thinking that he timed his shift to UKIP just right!