Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I did not have a chance to listen to that interview this morning but a number of people have mentioned it to me already so I will make a point of doing so later today. It is important to hear the voices of patients and parents. It is the best way to understand the impact this has had on them.

Let me not mince my words in any way. I am a politician and a medical doctor. I have come across, as have all of us in this House, a number of examples of failings in care and failures in our health service to provide the standard of care that we would expect for ourselves and our families. This is very much at the more severe end, in my view. What happened here is hard to accept. It is hard to accept that it happened in our country, and that there were huge failures of this nature involving children, in particular. Maybe it should it not, but it makes it feel worse that children who were supposed to be helped were harmed. There was overdiagnosis and there were incorrect diagnoses. Children were put on the wrong medicines and left on them for too long, and those medicines were not properly monitored. That just should not happen and it should have been detected and identified much earlier.

It is very disturbing that we find ourselves talking about this and more particularly, that those families are experiencing what they are experiencing at the moment. I do not think any of us can begin to contemplate how they must feel and how worried they must be. The most important thing that we must try to do is to put this right. That means making sure the families and children affected receive the services and supports they need. The HSE needs to be forthcoming and generous in that regard. There will not be any financial barrier from the Government when it comes to providing them with the services and supports they need. We have done that in previous instances, like with CervicalCheck, for example, where packages of support were put in place for families and patients and that needs to be done now.

In terms of the detail of the review and how that is going to work, the Cabinet has not yet had a chance to discuss this. We will discuss it on Tuesday and I know the Minister of State will provide more information on how that is going to operate as soon as she has it. I am sure it is absolutely the case that it will be necessary to provide financial compensation to many of the families affected by this. These are clear failings in care. This was care that was clearly not up to basic professional standards.

I have absolutely no doubt that families will bring cases forward, they will be assessed and compensation payments will need to be made. The Deputy knows from his experiences, as I do from mine, that this is a lot more complicated than it seems because every case is individual. We will need to find a mechanism to do that and we have had some initial discussions on how that can best be done and in a sensitive way.

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