Dr Muiris Houston writes, “Harney’s cost-cutting pragmatism raises the bar for the HSE to make best of scarce resources.”

The announcement came as a surprise made by the Minister for Health, Mary Harney. This has reversed her decision to begin a national cervical cancer immunization program.

The partial go-ahead for a national bowel cancer screening service will arguably be of much more public health benefit due to too much larger number of cancers involved.

The plan for 2010, which came after a draft Health Service Executive (HSE) service plan, pointed towards a probable 10 percent reduction in the number of patients treated in our public hospitals this year.

Ms Harney said that the program would not be started if there was no urgent requirement because it would not make sense to use scarce resources which could be developed somewhere else.

She also said that the Government had followed the best international practice in relation to the introduction of a vaccination program.

The government would have been unable to take chances relating t the pandemic and hinted out that a number of deaths had taken place in Ireland from swine flu.