WHEN SENATOR Niall Ó Donnghaile posted a tweet of nursing union boss Pat Cullen speaking at a Féile event during which she said she believed reunification offered the best hope for the future of the NHS, he did so in the knowledge that the huge benefits of a one-island health service are something appreciated by very many people, including health professionals.
But Ms Cullen has found to her cost that articulating an entirely mainstream opinion is only acceptable if that entirely mainstream opinion firstly adheres to the constitutional status quo and, secondly, doesn’t offend the tender sensibilities of some unionist politicians.
The UUP was quickest off the mark, demanding “clarity” from Ms Cullen’s employer, the Royal College of Nursing. Exactly what it is about a health union official expressing her opinion on the future of the health service the ‘middle of the road’ unionist party needs clarification on is not entirely clear, but experience tells us it likely has more to do with a desire to silence than a thirst for information.
In March 2014, Alliance Party MLA Anna Lo – then the only Chinese-born parliamentarian at Westminster and Stormont – said in an interview that her political preference was for a united Ireland. She immediately came under withering attack from senior unionist politicians. Two months later she was gone from politics, relating in an interview how she had experienced harrowing personal abuse from loyalists in the street and citing the support of prominent unionists for the notorious racist pastor James McConnell as another factor in her desire to quit.
The two cases are strikingly similar: two strong, powerful women set upon for forwarding an analysis that failed to chime with that of the unionist majority. The big difference, though, is that unionists were throwing their weight around as representatives of the majority here when they turned their fire on Anna Lo. Those days are gone and they’re not coming back – Pat Cullen is a hugely admired figure who has devoted her life to caring for others and she will therefore receive the support that her life’s work demands.
Which brings us back to the point she made and for which she has been set upon.
The NHS has been savagely battered by 13 years of deliberate neglect and underinvestment by successive Tory regimes chock-full of hard-right ideologues who make no secret of their desire for our health service to be privatised. They want to do this not because it will lead to better outcomes for the population, but because it will lead to better outcomes for the medical and pharma companies and financial institutions for whom so many Tory MPs are paid ‘consultants’ or second-job employees.
We have no idea what shape a new Ireland will take but there is a large majority here that wants the NHS to be part of whatever reformed constitutional arrangements lie ahead. Pat Cullen speaks for them.
