According to the Irish Nurses Organisation (INO) the number of people on hospital trolleys has gone over 400 on a number of recent occasions.

What is Mary Harney's department's response to this deepening crisis - a block on recruitment, 600 redundancies and a target of creating 200 extra hospital beds by the end of the year! The Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) at its recent conference said that 15,000 beds were needed to end the crisis in the A&E departments and in the health service generally. Mary Harney's heralded 10 point plan to alleviate the bed crisis has had no effect whatsoever.

How Harney can stand behind a block on recruitment in the health service when there is a chronic shortage of many frontline staff is baffling. Harney has apparently said that any job losses must come from "natural wastage" and must not have a detrimental affect on the delivery of services. This statement does not sit well with the fact that she is responsible for one of the most damaging initiatives ever to befall the public health service in Ireland - the National Treatment Purchase Fund.

The funding for this exercise in massaging the surgical waiting lists figures has increased by 50 percent from E40 million to E60 million. All the money that has been spent on the NTPF is money that has been denied to the public health service and has gone into the private sector both here and abroad. This is a perfect example of the attempts to create a two-tier health service by denigrating the public service.

The INO recently launched the "Enough is Enough" campaign in which they have called for public demonstrations outside A&E departments on Tuesdays and Thursdays with one Dublin and one provincial hospital being picketed each day at 1pm until 1.30pm. The Socialist Party welcomes this initiative but we believe it doesn't go far enough.

An alliance of health service unions should be formed around an action plan to defend the public health service and to demand an emergency programme to end the A&E crisis, the bed shortages and the waiting lists. This campaign should mobilise health service staff and local communities into a campaign of protests to put pressure on the government parties to deliver on measures to end the health crisis. The health service unions should also discuss a strategy of linking these protests to industrial action. The time for words and lobbying is over - now it is time for action.