Kathy Foley

Apr 22nd, 2007 

It was a heart-wrenching sight. The man crouched on O’Connell bridge had clearly been of some standing once: his cashmere overcoat and expensive leather shoes attested to that. Now there he was, seemingly destitute on the side of the road. 

I hunkered down beside him, anxious to discover what had reduced him to such a parlous state. “Are you OK?” I asked gently. He snivelled pitifully. “I sold the Beamer and I pawned all my gold cufflinks but I’m still homeless,” he choked. “It’s no good. I’m only a lowly hospital consultant. I’ll never be able to afford to buy a house.”

I sighed deeply. It makes me so angry that doctors spend years in medical school and yet they are never given even a basic primer on personal finance. They study anatomy, physiology and pathology and get special classes in self-importance but receive no instruction at all about life in the real world.

Just last week PJ Breen, who is part of the team negotiating with the health minister, Mary Harney, on behalf of the Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA), showed once again how little these unfortunates know about the workings of banks and the property market.

“What kind of house could you buy for €205,000?” demanded Breen, rejecting Harney’s offer of that amount for consultants working full-time in the public system. Breen knows enough about the property boom of the past decade to be aware that €205,000 would hardly buy a garden shed these days but, bless him, he doesn’t realise that handing over a year’s salary is not how you go about buying a house.

The first step in becoming a homeowner is not lugging a briefcase stuffed with €500 notes to the nearest estate agency. What the consultants don’t realise is that there are special loans called mortgages that enable people to buy a house or apartment.

On an annual salary of €205,000, a consultant should be able to get a mortgage of €1m. They certainly won’t be able to buy a decent-sized family home in Dublin 4 or Dublin 6, but the situation is not hopeless. If they are prepared to lower themselves to somewhere like, say, Foxrock, they should be able to buy a nice big house with a garden and still have plenty of spare cash for the finer things in life.

Unfortunately, the consultants are lumbered with such a sense of privileged entitlement that this standard of living is not enough for them. Dr Josh Keaveney, an anaesthetist in Beaumont Hospital, dismissed the salary offer of €205,000 as “Mickey Mouse” money.

It might be chump change to Keaveney but most of us dream of earning €205,000 a year. At that salary, he would be pulling in €109.50 an hour. The minimum wage is €8.30 an hour. The average industrial wage works out at about €15 an hour. It might surprise Dr K that people get by on that income. It’s tricky but they manage.

Keaveney was asked on Today FM news if he regretted the Mickey Mouse comment. He said he regretted that it was misinterpreted. I’m not sure how he could have been misinterpreted. Perhaps he meant that €205,000 was far too much money – “Mickey Mouse” in the sense that the Walt Disney Company had revenues of $34.3 billion last year.

I don’t think he did, though, because he also said the salaries proposed by Harney were so low that top consultants won’t be interested and only those looking for a “cushy number” will apply. I really hope I don’t have to be anaesthetised by him any time soon. “Now count backwards from 10 for me. Yes, 10, 9, 8, Jesus, aren’t you under yet? I’m not paid enough to stand here all day looking at you.”

Just to copperfasten the image of consultants as grasping boors, Keaveney added the salaries proposed for the new consultancy posts would not be enough to entice top Irish-born doctors home from the US, where they can earn $500,000 annually. That equates to about €365,000. If the doctors accepted Harney’s deal, they could earn €245,000 a year, as there are €40,000 bonuses going a-begging for those consultants who meet targets for treating patients.

I can understand that not all of those Irish-born doctors might be willing to take a €120,000 pay cut to come home and do their bit for the national health system but it some might. It would reflect the very first sentence of the Irish Medical Council’s guide to ethical behaviour: “The profession of medicine has a long and honourable tradition of service and care.”

Leaving aside the debate on whether consultants should be paid lots of money or obscene amounts of money, what I find rather disturbing is the doctors’ utter lack of political nous. They are sure doing a poor job of keeping their finger on the pulse of public opinion. At what meeting did they come up with the strategy of pleading the poor mouth? Did they think we would feel sorry for them? 

An Irish Medical News poll conducted last week found only 43% of respondents supported the nurses in their current industrial action. A similar survey on the consultants’ pay issue would surely find very few people in favour of raising the €205,000 salary offer. At least the nurses have recognisable grounds for complaint and succeed in stating their case with some humility.

Perhaps the consultants are right when they say that their counterparts in the public hospital systems of other countries are more highly paid, but their arrogant stance was never going to win them support. 

Hang tough, Harney. These guys don’t deserve to be paid any more than you’re offering.