Pat Buckley (Cork East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

My apologies, a Chathaoirligh, but we are being bounced through the committees today.

First, I congratulate the foundation. As I have often said here at this committee; this is a very different committee. It is last chance.com for somebody in the public to have his or her say and we are public representatives. It is our job and duty to listen to people but also then for them to have their own voice.

The point I would make, and I have said this across many campaigns, is to get the information out there. When this petition first came in to the committee, I said to myself that everybody knows about this, but they do not. My wife will kill me when I say this but prevention is better than cure. One does not have to elaborate on that statement.

Bringing the HSE before the committee is a great idea. We have always had an issue with many Departments in respect of accountability and oversight, or being able to get the right actual response to the question asked.

On a further question, which I am unsure if it has been asked already, but I ask about the disparity with respect to the letter supplied by the Department of Health in the figures or on the amount spent on the sepsis awareness campaign, and the fact that the two figures were very different. We are audited here and are fairly diligent when it comes to that. I again mention that because we are now talking about accountability and oversight. In the seven years since I have been here, and in my previous experience with town and county councils, the words which come up here all of the time are “accountability”, “responsibility”, and the final ones are “to be held to account” and it is there that this breaks down. It is so difficult to help people in this country because each and every Department makes it so difficult for people, such as our witnesses, to come inside and to enter into their patch. As they are now encroaching on it, and the first thing the Departments do is to put up their defensive wall. I know that when the issue is personal there is a stronger drive, but I will give the best example I can.

A good number of years ago I lost two brothers to suicide in the space of 16 months. The health system was crap and the coroner’s system was very poor. The courts were an absolute disgrace and after-care was not existent. When it is personal, one wants to make all the positive changes so that somebody else will not go through the same grievance, inconvenience. One scratches one’s head to say that no one else needs to die if it is done right. That is why I was mentioning the three points to our witnesses, where when one is trying to help people one meets a resistance. It is just mind-boggling.

I will finish on this point. I very much support bringing the HSE before the committee to ask the hard questions. At least, at that stage, we would get, I hope, some bit of accountability and the foundation might be able to move things forward a great deal faster. This is something that should be out there in the public domain. This is a preventive measure which is much cheaper and causes a great deal less grievance within families who are going through stuff like this.

We will not have to ask questions like this anymore as it will be dishing out good information and giving people answers. This is the way it should be going. I just want to say congratulations to the campaign group. I apologise again for being late but I do read my notes. It just goes to prove that. We get caught between committees. I thank Mr. Hughes very much.