Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

It would be difficult to overstate just how terrible was the tragedy and suffering inflicted on these families. After tragic situations occurred due to a lack of resources or a failure to have adequate patient safety, it appears that staff, under pressure from management, tried to cover up matters and prevent people from expressing any complaint about what had happened to them. It is horrendous. It is particularly worrying that frontline staff in Portlaoise had been making complaints consistently about the lack of patient safety, lack of resources and so on, but these were ignored. We then had tragedies occur followed by attempts to cover them up. One must ask what the hell is going on in Portlaoise, because side by side with this situation we find the matter, about which I did not get to ask this morning, which is the discovery in the Tusla office in the town of hundreds of unidentified child protection files on neglected and abused children. The figure has now risen to 1,200 and a report that was supposed to come back on what happened with these files has not come back so we do not know exactly what is going on. It looks like an absolutely disastrous situation in Portlaoise and one wonders if this is being replicated elsewhere in the system. Is it not ultimately the slashing of resources across the health service which has led to these terrible situations?

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