David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on what is important legislation. As we know, whistleblowing is an essential mechanism for exposing and stopping wrongdoing. We should do everything that we can possibly do to protect whistleblowers. As the health spokesperson for my party, I have seen far too many whistleblowers in the area of health come forward to expose wrongdoing. They have exposed horrific abuse and neglect, such as what happened in the context of CAMHS in Kerry in recent times. There have been so many examples of whistleblowers coming forward in the Department of Health and in health more generally. In the vast majority of cases, they have not been protected. In fact, they have become victims of the system. Very often, we quite rightly talk about the lack of accountability and transparency that exist in the Department of Health. I often say that if Pontius Pilate was alive and well and living in Ireland, he would probably be running the HSE. This is because it seems to me that in healthcare everybody washes their hands of responsibility. Senior management does not take responsibility. When good people, as we have seen in many cases, come forward to put important issues into the public domain, they then themselves become targets. They themselves become a problem. We saw it in more recent times when there were allegations that were subject to a “Prime Time Investigates” programme on databases of children with disabilities and autism.

There is a long list. I do not have the time to go through the long list of all of those cases of abuse and of neglect. Some of them were well articulated in this Chamber before Christmas. As we know, many of them are horrific. On the one hand, there are victims of abuse, of neglect, of bad policies, of a lack of clinical oversight and of a failure arising from a culture of unaccountability within the HSE and the healthcare systems. On the one hand, there are these victims and, on the other, there are people who come forward to blow the whistle on what is happening and who then become victims.

While I want to give the Minister credit where I can, I also have to be honest and say that the reason why we are actually debating this is because it transposes a new European minimum standards policy. This is not necessarily because the Government was motivated to do it. This State and this Government have much more to do to create a culture of accountability and transparency and to better protect whistleblowers when they come forward.

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