Pat Buckley (Cork East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I suppose the Minister is black and blue from listening to it, but I will cut straight to the chase. The duty of candour has to be put on a statutory footing. In the short few years I have been here, we have scandals including CervicalCheck, vaginal mesh, mother and baby homes, the mental health system and the disability system. It comes down to oversight, accountability and responsibility.

We are all working on this Bill together. That is the agreed basis. The Minister has heard most of us talk about it. If we cannot keep the onus on the service provider or the clinicians we are going back to where we started before. We will have nothing. People will lose faith in the screening services and we do not want that.

I will not mention any names but the patients are really at the heart of this. As I was listening to the debate I was saying to myself that we should not even be here. How hard is it to do the right thing? Let us break the status quo. Why is the Government so frightened? If we put the duty of candour on a statutory footing we will be nailing down accountability, responsibility and the oversight. It does not matter how big the mistake was or how far the actual incident had gone, it is about having the cojones to stand up and say we made a mistake and this person needs to be told the truth today. It is ludicrous that people are waiting on their screens to come back. I do not even think people are aware they actually have to ask for their results and whatever. If there is something wrong a person should be automatically told.

I worked on the protected disclosures legislation and one of the big changes in the Act that will be coming into force in January is the reversal of the burden of proof. Where somebody in a whistle-blowing situation made a protected disclosure, the person it was made to had no obligation to prove the whistle-blower was actually telling the truth. I raise that because with the duty of candour we are not forcing but putting it into law and doing the right thing by stating that people have a responsibiltiy in their jobs, whatever it is, and they will be held accountable. It is very easy to see when somebody is taking on this job that it is not a quick flip for money. I still cannot understand why we even outsourced these services when we have plenty of people well capable of carrying this out. It has been said many times that there is nobody on this side of the House, or any side of it, who has issues with the Bill, except for this one little thing. Paper never refuses ink, so the Minister still has an opportunity to change things and change them for the right. We cannot bring back any family members or anybody who has unfortunately passed but we can certainly take a giant step forward in doing the right thing. We can say we as a collective body passed legislation that had the core principles of proper oversight, proper accountability and proper responsibility, but with the responsibility on the service providers as well as on the patients.

I was reading though one of the notes, from which I will quote, "It was described by a survivor as like the tribunal all over again, nothing would be changed and we would have to look for it. That is not what we want, that we would actually have to look for our information". I appeal to the Minister. As I said, paper does not refuse ink. He can change things here. If we can nail down that duty of candour we will have done something right. My wife uses the services, as does my daughter. We want faith in them. You do not want something hanging over you just because of a technical glitch or because it was another word that was absent from this legislation. I appeal to the Minister. At the moment a service provider or clinician can sit back and say that if a patient does not ask them, they do not have to tell the patient. That is not proper legislation. There is a duty to say hold on, something is wrong here and to let that person or family know. It sounds like common sense but sometimes common sense - not even in inverted commas - comes into the House. It drives me bonkers and drives me mad. It is like self-regulation. If the Minister has the HSE investigating the HSE, we are not going to get accountability. We are not going to get proper oversight. I appeal to the Minister, if it is the only thing he can do, to ensure the duty of candour is on a statutory footing and that everybody involved moving forward will be held accountable if they do not do their job properly. Surely everybody should be responsible for what they do?

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