Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

This is obviously horrendous. It is horrendous for all of the families involved and it is a horrendous failure by the State. I am going to ask a series of detailed questions of the Minister later on, but for now I just want to put some things on the record. Various people are asking questions and so on, and I happen to know the answer to some of them. For example, I know that three springs were used. One caused severe damage to a child's pelvis and ribcage, requiring multiple operations; one broke a few ribs; and one is still in a patient, having broken, and may have corroded as a result of not being made of titanium, the appropriate metal. In March, pressure was put on surgeons to restart this surgery by CHI management, despite the fact that they knew about the high level of complications and despite the fact that tragically, one child had died. That is the case. I have an answer to a parliamentary question from CHI which denies that is the case. It states that CHI is not aware of any internal or external pressures on clinical staff to restart kyphectomy surgeries, but that is not accurate.

I have been pursuing this issue since April with a whole series of parliamentary questions. One of the troubling things, which raises a question about the governance of CHI, is that I repeatedly received inaccurate and wrong answers from CHI. When I first asked about the issue of unlicensed implants being used in surgeries in Temple Street, the answer I received from CHI was that to the best of its knowledge - and it struck me as strange when I got the answer that it contained that kind of qualification - everything was appropriately CE- licensed and so on. I went back to the person who had made the allegation to me, because I did not know whether it was accurate or not, and asked again. That person told me it was definitely the case, so I put a question in again. I got another answer, this time in late June, whereby the CHI stated that to the best of its knowledge it was gone, and restated that it was not the case. It clearly was the case, and it is now accepted that it was the case. We have a very significant problem where parliamentary questions are being answered wrongly. Later, I will pursue with the Minister - I presume he is expecting it - the question of when he knew about it. Obviously, the line is that the Minister and the Department knew about it only in August. If it was not clear from the questions in May and June, on 13 July I put in a series of questions which left the Minister in no doubt whatsoever, asking how many spring implants had been used in Temple Street hospital for spinal surgery in patients with spinal muscular atrophy and spina bifida, how many had been removed, how many had failed in situ, and whether they were CE-marked. At the very least, by 13 July the Minister was aware of the issue. The question that will arise for the Minister is what he did about it in the intervening period. I will finish by saying that throughout all of this the impression that has been given is that following on from the last external review, a new external review would be called. That was not going to happen. The only reason we are here now, and the only reason it is not still happening, is becasuse of a whistleblower and because of the articles we have seen onThe Ditch.

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