Comments by TUV South Antrim candidate Richard Cairns on health and education at today’s TUV manifesto launch:
“The NHS is for all us, and the front line staff are under severe pressure.
“That pressure is created by bad management, bad structure, and a lack of support.
“TUV will fight to protect the frontline services which all of us rely on when it comes to health.
“In our manifesto we outline some key priorities for health including:
- Hospital outpatient and inpatient waiting lists must be efficiently dealt with;
• Hospitals must be clean and safe;
• Front line services must be staffed effectively and efficiently to ensure that we all get the quality of care that the 21st century health service demands and
- Older people are cared for in a caring and dignified way.
“TUV exposed the fact that since 2011, under DUP control, the number of hospital beds has fallen by 540, almost 10 per cent. This is a huge contributor to the logjams in our emergency departments. There must be no further reduction in total bed numbers.
“The latest push for hospital closures comes under the guise of the report by Sir Liam Donaldson, which Health minister Wells has already embraced. The first recommendation of the Donaldson report is the audacious and undemocratic demand that political parties should blindly commit themselves to accept the findings of an international audit as to what hospitals we need. TUV will do no such thing. We will not give such a blank cheque to those wishing to shut vital hospitals. That may be the DUP minister’s plan, but it certainly is not ours.
“We are the only Unionist party to take a clear stand on the proposed changes to abortion legislation in Northern Ireland.
“There is a superficial plausibility within the promotion of abortion in the recent consultation by the Department of Justice in cases of potentially fatal abnormalities but the experience of the 1967 Act in Great Britain is a salutary warning against such glib assurance.
“There is a danger that the Minister’s proposals will be exploited. Therefore TUV rejects any change to the existing law.
“As with health, education is one of the vital measures by which we can asses if a government really is delivering. In Northern Ireland education has been plunged into utter chaos by Sinn Fein under devolution. No one should be surprised that Sinn Fein, with its Marxist, anti-stability agenda, should wish to destroy our highly successful education system.
“We have seen academic selection, not saved as an integral part of our education system, as promised, but expelled outside the confines of regular and prepared primary/secondary school progression to the wilderness of unregulated mayhem for parents and pupils.
“TUV supports academic selection where that suits the abilities of children who wish to avail of it. We further believe that parents are entitled to have their children prepared accordingly in primary school, but for those children who don’t take that route there must be equal consideration and secondary education funded adequately to optimise their talents.
“There must be no funding hierarchy whereby secondary schools are disadvantaged. Northern Ireland must value all its children, but to do so we must equally facilitate the academic potential of some – rather than thwart it – and the different talents of others. Choice, not prescription, is our guide.
“In relation to teacher training, TUV believes very strongly in the retention of Stranmillis University College. Stranmillis, with its unique ethos, must not become a sacrificial lamb to the Alliance Party’s policy of social engineering.”