Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The former Minister knew about this since May last year. Parents found out last week. The Minister is absolutely right about how it must feel for parents. Imagine thinking that was your child. The draft report has been published. It found that hundreds of children did not need this operation.

We now have this other information from 2016, which I just put on the record, where a second opinion was sought. The parent talked about how the child was going to go under the knife and have her hip sawed into, a second opinion was sought and they were told the child did not need the operation and did not even have the condition. She is currently enrolled in gymnastics. This is a scandal of huge magnitude. This is not a lone incident. We have put other cases that have come to us on the record where people got second opinions only to be told the exact same thing, that the child did not have the condition, and where the child is now thriving.

The audit is looking at a period of two years and 561 children have to be recalled. If this issue goes back as far as 2014 or 2016, we are potentially talking about thousands of children.

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