Privatisation and outsourcing.

Privitisation? It is a topic I would prefer to hedge my bets on.

It's not just the Private sector.

Successive Governments have outsourced social care and support services to the NGO Industrial Complex too.

Not sure why the OP edited the part of their post about delayed hospital discharges and homecare. Edit: nevermind, that part was in a subsequent post, apologies.

The shambles that is homecare is very relevant to any discussion about privatisation and outsourcing. I don't know if the major problems with this essential public service are due to politicians and senior public servants being useless or due to an agenda to run down services and outsource them. A combination of both I suspect.

I have experience of carers from private agencies, NGOs and directly employed by the HSE. There are problems with all three. The HSE is inept when it comes to managing contracts with private service providers. Complaints about poor service result in a "shur what can we do" response. Also, claims that the problems would not arise if HSE was given the resources to provide the service directly. However, my experience of care provided directly by the HSE staff is that there are big problems there too.

Leaving aside homecare, I worked in the public service for many years and saw it from the inside. I never perceived there to be an overt privatisation agenda. However, since the financial crisis there seems to be an obsession with not replacing retired/resigned staff unless it's a "trendy" area and many essential public services are far from trendy. Don't hire people. Treat staff like they are a burden. String them along with acting up positions and short term contracts. Keep loading more and more work onto existing staff. When the inevitable happens and a poor service is provided, use that as justification for outsourcing. Setup to fail, in other words. Of course the individuals in power won't outsource themselves, just other people. They would happily run public services down to nothing as they'll get their fat pensions no matter what happens.