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People Before Profit has organised a public meeting on Daisy Hill Hospital tonight Monday 2 November, 7pm at Ballybot House as the suspension of maternity services looms. The Southern Trust are holding a meeting tomorrow morning in Newry to discuss their plans.
Richard Boyd Barrett TD, the party’s parliamentary leader, will headline a panel alongside Rebekah Corbett, a former Unison organiser, and PBP’s Newry and Armagh representative Marc Mac Seáin. The panel will discuss how people power through community and workplace organising is the only way to protect the hospital.
Mac Seáin said the campaign to protect Daisy Hill needs to step up. “We think the fightback for Daisy Hill needs to be escalated, just as it successfully happening against austerity across Europe and we’ll discuss how that could be done.”
He pointed to what he described as years of reductions at the hospital.
“We’ve seen cut after cut for years at Daisy Hill. Consultants leaving, services removed, beds & wards cut. The only times this have been paused or reversed even temporarily have been in the face of large community mobilisations through the SOS Daisy Hill campaign. Yet the direction of travel has been for managed decline.”
Mac Seáin was also critical of politicians at Stormont and of the health policy that has shaped services.
“Our politicians most particularly those in Stormont have miserably failed to stem this tide. In fact they’ve given political cover to service collapse through support for centralisation through the Bengoa Report. When Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill was health minister in 2016 she passed that report alongside support from Unionist parties, SDLP and Alliance None of these parties have pulled their support for that decade old report which remains the standard for the Dept of Health.”
On funding and waiting times, he said: “The British treasury gives poverty budgets and Stormont meekly administrates them. Our standard of healthcare in the North is much worse than in similar NHS services across the British state. Less than half of A&E patients here get seen within hours compared to 7 in 10 who are in England. Around 35% of cancer patients start treatment here in 62 days, whilst the target is 95%, much lower than England’s 65%. Ambulance wait times are abysmal, with queues outside Craigavon regularly of 8-10 hours which will become much worse. We cannot allow things to get worse and must organise ourselves against it. Stormont won’t.”
Mac Seáin said the meeting will look at examples of community and trade union action, and the role industrial action could play.
“We saw with Garvaghy Road how a community coming together can stop the state. In the free state 300k+ unionised public sector workers have forced pay negotations through strike, similar to the 150k strong strike here in 2024 to bring Stormont back. Unions will ballot in November and strike action around service closures should absolutely be part of that. We should take inspiration from the French student movement which has won a reform package or the Spanish housing movement. If we don’t get organised and escalate in communities & workplaces, Daisy Hill will be left as a husk”
