Health Minister criticised for investing in 'political extravagance'

The Minister in charge of the cash-strapped health service came under fire after admitting that her department has spent over £180,000 to translate documents over the past three years.

Health Minister Bairbre de Brun was criticised following her answer to a written question submitted by the DUP's Ian Paisley Jr. Ms de Brun confirmed that from taking office until December 2001, £181,639.18 had been spent on rendering Irish, Chinese, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi and Ulster Scots translations of department documents.

Mr Paisley said: "The spending by the minister on bilingual policy is astronomical. It has increased almost sevenfold since she took office and shows absolutely no sign of decreasing.

"Given the problems that we have in the health service, many people will be really concerned that almost £200,000 to date has been wasted on this needless political extravagance."

Ms de Brun denied that the bilingual expenditure had been wasteful and said that the money promoted pluralism in society.

"People who have grown up having their entire schooling through the Irish language, have the right to be communicated with in their own language. This is not, as Ian Paisley says, an idea of an English service that is somehow translated into other languages. This is a service for a pluralist society and this is a service that needs to be delivered in the languages that people speak," she said.

Since taking up her portfolio three years ago, the cost of translations has risen from £16,896.49 in 1999, to last year's tally of £111,626.85.

A spokesman for the department of health, social services and public safety said the increase was due to the larger number of documents being published.

Concerns over the health service's funding had reached crisis-point of late. On January 10, the Minister said: "We do not have the luxury of being able to carry any spare capacity in our system to meet the levels of demand we are now experiencing. In spite of some additional funding allocations, we do not have the money at present to make the necessary investment in building up our capacity."

In November junior doctors' leader Peter Maguire told the British Medical Association committee meeting in Belfast that problems were continuing to mount at a worrying rate and the service was headed for 'meltdown'.

The department has a budget of over £2 billion and further increases in waiting lists at hospitals in Northern Ireland have left over 54,000 people waiting for treatment – the worst in the UK.

(GMcG)