Workers’ Party representative for Newry, Nicola Grant, has said that the recent health debate in the Assembly “didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know”.

She added that her party “has been pointing out for well over a decade that the type of rushed reforms that were pushed through by the then Minister for Health and supported by the Health Committee and other so called leadership figures in our communities, reforms that were proposed with the sole intention of balancing the books, have now finally brought the health and social care services to its knees.

“We heard the Minister state that a major problem was the lack of care home places and domiciliary care packages that were hampering hospital discharges. This was all very predictable at the time and warnings from trade unions and political parties outside the Assembly were ignored in the push towards the privatisation of these vital services.

"Millions was spent on the failed Transforming Your Care reforms that was supported only by vested interests inside and outside of the healthcare system.

“These services were privatised not to deliver better services, they were privatised to deliver cheaper services to the detriment of service users and workers.

"The Minister now wants to introduce a living wage for this sector which is laudable. But a much better solution would be to bring all of these services back into the public sector, that would be a win for workers and service users. The private sector is about making a profit, not delivering quality services - if there’s not a profit to be made they don’t and won’t do it.”

Nicola concluded that “vested interests are still pushing reforms that undermine the founding principles of the National Health Service by privatisation and fragmentation”.

She continued: “Our politicians have not learned any lessons from past mistakes. The Executive is once again engaged in rancour instead of rigor and are refusing to acknowledge and reverse prior decisions that led to the creation of this crisis.

"Only a return to the founding principles of the National Health Service will halt its decline and only by funding it properly can we start the process of dealing with the decades of health inequalities that working class families and rural communities are suffering on a daily basis.”