Séamus Healy (Tipperary South, Workers and Unemployed Action Group) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak to the motion. I offer my sympathy to the parents and families of the babies who died at Portlaoise hospital and commend the courage and tenacity of the families who brought this sad episode to the public's attention. I pay tribute, in particular, to Mark and Róisín Molloy and Amy Delahunt and Ollie Kelly who presented their case to the Joint Committee on Health and Children last Thursday.

Although I support the motion, it does not go far enough. While addressing the committee last Thursday, representatives of the families involved called on the Minister for Health to commence an independent investigation into the affair. Ms Delahunt stated:

Given this presentation, the Minister must initiate an investigation into all levels of HSE management relating to this scandal. This HSE management team is clearly incapable and cannot be trusted to implement the recommendations made in this or previous HIQA reports.

Such an investigation should go right to the top of the HSE. It must not be confined to front-line services which are understaffed, under-resourced and under-equipped. HIQA's report confirms the experiences of the families and describes the nightmares they faced. It is a damning indictment of the HSE right up to its most senior management. It notes that families were left believing there was a cover-up. They were encouraged to go down the legal route to ensure investigations would not take place. They were misled and perhaps even lied to by being informed that the incidents they had experienced had never happened previously, only to find out subsequently that a number of other families had had similar experiences. The report describes failures at local, regional and national level and a system that is dysfunctional. The system produced the opposite of the open disclosure we might have expected.

I read the report with a mixture of sadness, disappointment, frustration and anger. The lack of compassion and humanity identified in the report was particularly disturbing. It described a HSE which was not fit for purpose and which should be disbanded. The HSE should never have been established in the first place and I voted against its establishment when it was first proposed. The fact that it is not fit for purpose is made clear by the disastrous reconfiguration of services in the north east and the mid-west, as well as the huge problems in emergency departments, the 400,000 people awaiting outpatient appointments, the medical card debacle and the reconfiguration of mental health services in the south east. The Government and its predecessor cannot wash their hands of blame, Pontius Pilate-like, because one cannot cut the health budget by €4 billion and 11,000 staff and expect it to continue as heretofore. HIQA found that the hospital was not governed, resourced or equipped to provide the level of service expected from it. The chief executive of HIQA has stated the increasing pressure on maternity services at the hospital was highlighted as long ago as 2004 and that additional deficiencies in midwifery staffing levels were identified in a review carried out by the hospital in 2006. These issues were not substantively addressed until 2014, following publication of the Chief Medical Officer's report and after the damage had been done. The reductions in staffing and resources must be taken into account.

I commend Patient Focus for the help it gave to the families in Portlaoise. An independent patient advocacy authority must be established on a statutory basis because that is the only way patients will be properly advised and represented.

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