You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In 1985, having returned to Ireland for my father’s final illness, I was standing beside his bedside when the chief physician came by on his morning rounds. After he had inspected my dad from the foot of the bed, I approached him for a progress report but he walked away. My mother later explained that, since my dad was a “medical card patient,” the doctor would not speak to us on the ward. We would have to see the doctor at his consulting office to get any information, and it was essential to have £40 visible to lubricate the conversation. Thirty years later, and following the unprecedented economic boom known as the Celtic Tiger, Ireland’s public health service is in tatters due to the elimination of physician and nurse positions, and the development of a costly and bloated regulatory structure. Currently, there are 530,000 people on waiting lists for essential inpatient and outpatient services (Cullen, 2016). In 2016, a year in which typically more than 500 patients spend 24–48 hours on trolleys waiting for beds in Irish hospital emergency rooms every night, O’Regan (2016) reports that in January and February alone almost 10,000 frail elderly persons were forced to wait on trolleys for at least 9 hours before being placed in a bed. My frail mom, who passed away in 2015, endured a 15 hour wait for triage after a fall and was told she might have to wait 10 more hours before transport back to her nursing home could be provided. She never graduated from a trolley in the hall to a hospital bed. I stood with her (insufficient chairs were available for caregivers), and I witnessed a person nearby literally dying on a hallway trolley. So, in dealing with the complexities of nationalized healthcare in the era of what Jameson (1991) calls late capitalism, we must be prepared to talk of social death (Patterson, 1985), invisible genocide (Scheper-Hughes, 2003), and the problem of placing suffering human beings in what Agamben (2005) calls states of exception. Since each one o