Maev-Ann Wren

With its genesis in a series of articles entitled “An Unhealthy State” which ran in The Irish Times over five days in October 2000, this polemical and controversial book is the definitive statement on the health care scandal in Ireland.

Maev Ann Wren was the principle author in the team of writers who contributed to the long running series – and the principle target for the ensuing reaction.

“We have no intention of … being told what to do by a journalist with a one-woman mission,” wrote Dr Peter Kelly, a consultant pathologist at the Mater Hospital in Dublin in an article which responded to the series on the paper’s opinion page.

But this is not a book about Wren or about hospital consultants. This book is about the intriguing question of why it is that Ireland is almost unique in Europe in the degree of inequity in its healthcare system. What is it about Irish society? Why have we tolerated the present system for so long?

Who and what stands in the way of Irish healthcare reform? Why in the year 2002, over 50 years after Noel Browne’s defeat, does Ireland remain an unhealthy state?

ISBN: 9781902602882; Trade PB; 364 pp; October 2002