I have never and would never become a member of the IMO, for reasons made clear in the recent past.

What is incredibly interesting is the psychological processes and moral philosophy that those who continue to invest in this morally bankrupt organisation. Personally I feel that the extent of continued loyalty and involvement with the IMO, (some 90% of members have chosen to stand by their man and continue to pay for McNieces  grotesque indulgence) is a reflection of a psychopathology that is gaining precedence throughout the medical profession, not least amongst General Practitioners.

I don't suggest that most of the GP's who maintain an involvement or association with the IMO are in anyway as devious or venal as those who were involved in the 20 million McNiece package.  I do however suspect that there is something deeper going on.  In a previous post on this forum regarding the GP "Conference" in Newbridge, one reply responded to the point that the event was being sponsored by American Health Insurance Companies, by ignoring the point, and by listing the sponsors and simply not including the American Health Insurance Company  in his list of sponsors, nor did the commentator mention that he himself was to be a presenter or chair of a portion of the conference.  I don't wish to criticise on an individual basis however what I am attempting to point to is the fact that as the initial post of this thread, clearly shows a willingness and an enthusiasm  to 'forgive and forget' that extends beyond Christian delusions and encourages others to do the same, to ignore, or not see the the faults with the IMO:  Not to be blinded by misfortune or accident, but to become wilfully blind and to do it in a spirit of togetherness.

"I saw an organization that is totally different from the organization of  2 to 3 years ago.It certainly made my mind up to stick with the IMO"

The reference to the 2-3 years ago is undoubtedly in reference to the IMO of McNiece and of Minister Reilly. Let us pose the question how many lives would 20 million euro purchase? Let us make it better and ask how many Black  lives might be purchased with 20 million Euro?  Upon what horizon does the vulgarity of the McNiece affair warrant consideration? What harm did this 20 million deal do?  Perhaps the answer on a private level is nothing, but are there other levels besides that of the personal and private preservation? No one was immediately harmed in any considerably way by the deal, and indeed the IMO would not have agreed to it if it did not believe at some stage that it could afford it. So in essence what real harm is there for an organisation to gift one of its more senior cronies, a parting gift?

This is a fundamental difficulty with the McNiece affair is.that we cannot or (more worryingly) will not see the true nature of the immorality.  There was a time in our history when mothers and fathers and school teachers and doctors refused to see immorality of an equally grotesque nature.  When Children would come from the sacristy trembling with fear, perhaps in tears, or they might come home from school having been kept back in the office of one of the Brothers for a special talking too or special attentions. I have three children and if one of them was being sexually abused by an adult, I am convinced I would know or suspect something. I am equally convinced that many many parents of the victims of Child abuse, on a certain  psychological level.. knew that something was not right with their child.  And yet they could not, or would not see the evil that was being perpetrated, perhaps because its true extent was too horrific to contemplate.  This lack of  vision was the crime the lies within the crime of Child abuse, that so few did or said anything, but continued to see the world in the same way.

In the same respect when Jews were being put into ovens, the real horror lies outside the act itself  and in the deeper and more disturbing reality that many many more, knew, and yet chose not to know.   These are the famous 'unknown knowns' of Donald Rumsfelt, things that we dont know that we know.  Regardless of the differing levels of 'evil' in each of the crimes, there is a deeper evil, a deeper corruption that we have yet to evolve beyond, and that is the capacity to perceive things as we wish to perceive them, despite the reality of the truth being far removed from our perceptions.

I make no bizarre or ridiculous assertion when I state that the IMO have  refused to open their books to an honest scrutiny.  I make no bizzare assertion when I point to the reality that it has decided against an internal audit informing members that it "cannot afford one".  These are not imaginations but realities, that Dr Wally and his audience of the willing do not wish to include upon the horizon of anti-HSE invective.  The above post suggests that we doctors should stand together (with the IMO) against the government (the imagined evil), Whilst in reality it is a well publicised fact that the Minister himself was on the very IMO committee that approved the Mcniece obscenity.

The evil here is not the IMO nor is it the HSE nor is it the Government, it is we ourselves and our capacity for self delusion, our willingness to see medicine and perhaps the world at large in the manner in which we Choose to perceive it, rather than its true and honest form.

To my mind this is the greatest of all evils, as it is the evil that permits evil to build and grow to its fantasic apogees.  Participation in the IMO is not an evil act but it does point to the fact that one chooses to see reality in a certain way, in a manner that can perhaps be described as self serving and in a certain sense pathological.

It would make no difference what so ever if the IMO were to collapse and we doctors were to have no voice and could take no united stand against the Government and the HSE, if there were no IMO and no Stand we might actually take the first step towards an honest and morally soundview of reality, without this clarity of vision that will only arrise out of catharsis, we can and will never make a stand that will have any value other than the value we hope to gain for our own selfish purposes.

There is a fundamental immorality within the McKniece affair which essentially lies at the heart of our public and private malaise, the notion that 'success' is related to material wealth.  I don't wish to point fingers however when one looks at the head of the health service observes the Ministers 16 bedroomed Laughton Manor on its 150 acre garden (google a picture for the hell of it), One is at first reminded of Tolstoy's Classic 'How Much Land Does a Man Need'. 200 years ago Ireland was governed by absentee landlords who lived in castles, on vast estates and were all bankrupt.

What has changed in our society? When was it that we signed off on the dream of our founding fathers, and became the very English lords that so many died to  liberate us from?  Pearse had a cottage in Rosmuc that speaks a deeper poetry than a thousand Laughton Manors, and yet this honest simplicity, a simplicity that is ordered about things of a supreme and sublime nature has been almost entirely displaced by our dysfunctional version of an American nightmare.

The deeper vulgarity of the McNiece affair is the notion that one man should take 20 million for himself. That one person should "need" so much in order to be impossibly happy? When we associate with and entirely unreformed and unrepentant  IMO this is the deeper vulgarity that we subscribe to. There are consultants in Ireland who make almost million per year, there are GP's who make half a million per year; all of this indulgent excess is normalised by the IMO's arrangements with McNiece.  It is not only normalised but our own involvement with the materialism that is the root and cause of most of our social pathology is mitigated and entirely relativised. What is my own excessive income of some 70k in the face of the McNiece millions? I am on the breadline it would seem.

I am not a believer in the Catholic notion of God, however what if we are to be questioned at the end of our days, what if we are to be asked, not what we gave to charity, and how many we healed.  What if we are asked to account for how much we have taken for ourselves?

Our national pathology is a moral, a philosophical pathology and we are no doctors unless we become the first to recognise the cause of our current plague, the plague of modern civilisation.  Those who have the courage to see clearly here do so with the vision of a Pearse, a Pasteur,  a Semelweis or perhaps even a Christian.