Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I also condemn the genocide perpetuated by the sectarian apartheid Israeli state against innocent Palestinians and I support the BDS campaign against that nation.

I want to return to the cervical smear issue. The way in which this issue is being handled is an absolute disservice to the women at the heart of it and it is perpetuating a situation whereby we will not change things if we do not cop on. That there are people who are surprised about a memo which stated to leave a decision on telling people until the legality is sorted out shocks me. Where have those people been? Do they not know there are people who have seen their babies die or be gravely injured in our hospitals who have not been given answers? Do they not know there are men who have held their wives' hands as they were robbed of their lives as a result of clinical negligence in our hospitals and they cannot get answers? Have people in here forgotten Portlaoise and Portiuncula, and it taking ten years or three and a half years for reports to be published, and that today five bereaved families are still before the courts? Do people not know this is what happens in our health service, that maybe five or ten years after people suffer a devastating loss they might settle with the HSE and they might get an apology or a few answers, but they might not? That is our health service.

We might need a commission to find out how the latest scandal happened, but we do not need a commission to tell us why. It is happening because of the actions of everybody in this House and frankly I am sick of it. I could not care less if the Taoiseach was the health Minister or if Deputy Micheál Martin was the health Minister because it goes on. Governments are too busy staying in power to actually govern, the Opposition is too busy scoring cheap political points to actually hold the Government to account, and the media are too bloody lazy to analyse what goes on in here so the Civil Service rules, unelected and unaccountable.

We do not need a new oversight governance body here. There is a suite of measures which has long been flagged that could alter and transform the situation now. It is in the programme for Government. There is mandatory open disclosure, which the Government baulked from and which Fianna Fáil was knobbled on and on which it voted against us last year. Last year, Deputy Frances Fitzgerald promised us that mandatory inquests into maternal deaths would be delivered before the summer. The Taoiseach told me in February the legislation would be published. It has still not been published. We passed pre-action protocols but they have not been enacted.

A huge amount of what has gone on in our health service is because of litigation in the backdrop. It is a requirement to notify the State Claims Agency 48 hours after a serious adverse incident but not to tell the patient.

Clinical claims against the State have an estimated cost of €1.98 billion, an increase of €1 billion in five years. Families are being dragged through the courts. If a family do not have the funds required, they cannot do this because they have to pay for their own expert reports. We know of the case of one family with a child with cerebral palsy in whcih 46 expert reports were commissioned over six years before the family received damages. Of the 244 cases that were settled in 2016, only five went to court. There are measures in the programme for Government which, if they were enacted, would transform the situation. Will the Taoiseach look at them, including having a no fault compensation system to deal with this issue once and for all to take the lawyers out of hospitals?

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