The unsustainability of welfare services

The leader Welfare System Under The Spotlight Again (February 3) is a timely warning regarding a matter which should concern everyone.

As was well pointed out, the continuing addition to our free public health and education services, which is patently beyond our means, cannot go on for much longer.

We seem to have grown comfortable with a culture of "money no object" with regard to our public finances.

And it is not only the large and annually growing budget deficit together with the repeated warnings of the EU to put our house in order, that is frankly worrying. It is also and more the complacency with which each successive Administration seems to confront the problem.

Add to this the ongoing raising of the expectations of our people to a wider, costlier, free national health and education service.

If any example were needed, the recent document dealing with the reform of the primary health service can provide it.

Here a computerised, 24/7 national GP service is projected without any indication of the cost of such a reform and where the necessary finance is to come from.

All we get is the mantra, "the national health service will remain completely free".

The reform, of course, is generally desirable, particularly by senior citizens such as myself, but as the years wear on the anxiety grows that the whole structure is more than the financial base can bear and may one day start crumbling.

The feeling is that we pull out the word "sustainable" only when it suits us.

Otherwise it is the old game of parish-pump, party politics, played by both major parties, each blinkered to the present reality and seeing only in their tunnel vision the vote lost or won in the next general election.