Carol Nolan (Offaly, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this important matter. Obviously, it is upsetting for so many parents across the State and for even TDs here who have had personal experience in some form or other.

We should always at least try and avoid the temptation to make any single institution the scapegoat for what are clearly systemic problems around governance and the care of children in the health service. We have fantastic people working in the health service, but where there are issues. Where mistakes are made, we need responsibility, we need accountability, we need the problems to be resolved and we need to make sure those problems never occur again. That is something that we all need to be committed to.

Unfortunately, children have been on the receiving end of appalling service deficits since long before the CHI scandal emerged. That said, it is impossible to stand here, having reviewed the record of CHI since its establishment in 2019, and be anything other than appalled at the sheer horror caused by its grievous failures. I look back now at the debate in September 2018, when the what became the Children's Health Act was introduced by the former Minister for Health, Deputy Simon Harris. The Act provides CHI with its statutory remit. At the time, Deputy Harris stated that CHI had been given broadly worded functions that would:

... provide clarity, authority and certainty relating to its leadership role nationally in paediatric healthcare and the national model of care. It will deliver on its remit for education, research, philanthropy and advocacy on behalf of children's health care in this country.

He also stated that the new entity would be led by a 12-member competency-based board appointed by the Minister for Health. This makes it absolutely clear that there is an element of political and ministerial accountability that cannot be evaded. The Ministers who have been and gone appointed the leadership of CHI and, yet, time and time again, it has displayed catastrophic failures of judgment, of which that relating to the national children's hospital is the most recent and blatant. We can sit here and rightly condemn CHI for its institutional failures but we must also insist on political accountability or this cycle of vicious incompetence will never end.

I have met the parent of a child who has fought for so long to get an operation for her child. What she has said to me is that as well as the frustration and the upset, there is a serious vacuum when it comes to communication. That certainly is something that should be easily fixed. We need communication with parents whose children are caught up in this or those of children who are still waiting for important and major operations.

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