John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I extend my sympathy to the bereaved and those who have suffered such terrible losses. I cannot begin to imagine the pain they continue to experience which has been compounded by certain factors which came into play following the deaths of their children. What they have endured is simply horrific.

I am terribly sad about the position in which our guests find themselves and I am also somewhat despondent about the remedy on offer. I have been back in Ireland for 22 years and it is apparent to me that there are really significant problems with the health system which I have been trying to highlight for a long period. The committee will be discussing this matter later in the afternoon, at which point I will be asking some very hard questions and making a number of extremely tough suggestions.

The notion of a cover-up is absolutely plausible to me. I have seen evidence of cover-ups within the health system on many occasions. A year after I returned to Ireland I discovered that the cancer service here was utterly abnormal by any international standard and began to make waves about the matter. Serious attempts were made to shut me up and have me disciplined or even fired. If I had not been operating under the old consultants' contract, after completing the first year in which I had security of tenure, I have no doubt that I would have been fired.

I recall going to meetings with senior figures of the Department of Health when this became a big news story after two or three years and I started rattling the cans. I was told they would try to do something about it but that I must shut up. I must not go public about it because the Minister did not want to read any more accounts about people dying unnecessarily from cancer treatment. When the Limerick cancer services disaster happened, a doctor on the ground, who saw real problems with the service, went to the Department of Health a long time in advance of it becoming public. The person in question had a position of responsibility in the Department and is someone who has often sat in these chairs. Nothing was done, though, and the doctor was subtly threatened. He was told that the course of action he was taking was inappropriate and it was suggested he should be the subject of disciplinary censure himself for not going through other channels. As a result, he shut up pretty quickly.

Why does this happen? The problem is that the collective health administration, the leadership class in the health service in this country, namely, the HSE, the Department of Health and even HIQA, has a corporatism about it. They see "us" and "them". "Us" are the only non-self-interested party in the whole potpourri of those competing interests who have their paws out for something. They believe they are the only people in the world, not just in the Irish health system, who are capable of acting without self-interest. In fact they do act out of self-interest. Their constituency is complicated by the fact that, while there are both "us" and "them", there are two different kinds of "them". On one hand there are the "them" who represent the patients who have suffered and who have asked for adequate resourcing and appropriate answers to harsh questions. On the other hand, there are the "them" who are the doctors, nurses and midwives who point out the deficiencies in the system but are dismissed as being shroud wavers. I was horrified to read in black and white today that folks in the Coombe hospital were raising issues which were clearly being ignored.

Where does the responsibility lie for this? I have given the Neary episode so much thought over the years. What an awful tragedy to be visited on people.