It didn’t make the TV news as far as I know, but Junior Minister for Health, Máire Hoctor, was booed off the stage by a very large and very angry crowd in Nenagh on Saturday when she tried to defend the Government’s decision to (effectively) slowly shut down Nenagh General Hospital.

It was a serious situation and not the kind of thing you witness all that often. What happened was that Hoctor, who had barely managed to introduce herself to the crowd (of average, everyday, middle-income, buggy-pushing folk) – a crowd which only moments before had warm-heartedly and good naturedly applauded the likes of Eamon Gilmore and Morris Nelligan – before the mood changed so quickly and so radically that event organisers appeared to advise the Junior Minister to step back from the microphone and slip quietly away into the background, which she did. The following speaker, government-supporting-independent Michael Lowry, suffered the same fate.

You’ll get some idea of what happened from the video below. The Hoctor situation begins around 7.30, the Lowry situation directly thereafter. The clip doesn’t give the full flavour of what went on – the cameraman was obviously very near to the PA system so you get the sense that Hoctor could actually be heard above the din which, in fact, she couldn’t. You also don’t get the sense of how vigorously the the crowd opposed her. Nor do you see how ignominiously she shuffled away from centre stage. 

Is this a planning issue? Sure it is. First, the gradual phasing out of smaller hospitals in favour of larger (sort of privately run) medical factories in the big cities is the logical conclusion of the government’s National Spatial Strategy which, in all but name, discriminates against people who don’t live in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford. It also might be considered a planning matter in that, in order for the plan to succeed, a considerable amount of infrastructure needs to be in place before the services currently being provided in hospitals like Nenagh and Ennis can be shifted to Limerick Regional. The infrastructure in question - by everyone's estimate - will not be ready by April 1st, the day on which Nenagh Hospital’s gradual demise is set to begin.
 
Meanwhile, getting back to the Junior Minister, there is some discussion that Hoctor (allegedly) told interested parties early last week that if opposition to the proposed, eh, hospital reorganisation were to receive the kind of reception it ultimately actually did receive at Saturday’s  demo, then Nenagh hospital might be spared at the expense of Ennis. If this is so, then Tony Killeen and Timmy Dooley might want to avoid Ennis on the day the inevitable demonstration takes place when the Clare people figure out the Government's exit strategy.

Meanwhile, meanwhile, why are these people still in government?