
Simon Harris Has To Go - Along With A System Of Broken Promises
18 August 2025
Simon Harris broke a promise. In 2017, when he was the Minister for Health, he promised that no child would wait longer than 4 months for vital spinal surgery. But children did wait, in terrible pain.
9 year old Harvey Sherratt was promised surgery in 2022, scheduled for 2023. It was cancelled and his family weren’t told he’d been removed from the Children’s Health Ireland list.
He eventually had his surgery last November. While he waited his spine continued to curve. He sadly died this year. Simon Harris broke a promise and children suffered.
But it’s not just the promise made in 2017 that Simon Harris broke. He spat on the promise made by heroes like James Connolly. The 1916 Proclamation declared the principle of: “cherishing all the children of the nation equally”
Simon Harris puts the profits of his rich puppet masters before the values of the 1916 rebels. Values the working class people of Ireland hold dear. And that’s the secret of why he broke his promise of 2017.
He’s made an unspoken promise to the rich to do whatever he can to run down the public health service in order to drive us all into the hands of private hospital owners like Irish billionaire Larry Goodman or the rich sisters of the Bon Secours.
That unspoken promise to the rich is made by every single Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael minister.
That’s why every health minister for decades has implemented the same Thatcherite, neoliberal policies of outsourcing and privatization, they’ve run down public health to put cash into the pockets of private profiteers.
That’s why children suffer. That’s why women died after they outsourced cervical check to private labs. That’s why billionaires like Denis O’Brien, Larry Goodman and other private hospital owners were given €300 million during Covid for beds that were never used.
As long as puppets of the rich are in power we live under a system of broken promises. We have to put the working class in the driving seat of a planned economy, where we democratically decide how to spend the vast wealth our work creates.
This country needs a working class rebellion. That’s what the Red Network wants.
In a working class led socialist economy the market would be excluded from the health service and decisions would be made by doctors, nurses and other workers, not billionaires.