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

We are back again. It is not easy to come in here and say what Deputy Brennan said, and I admire him for that. I think we all have our personal stories. Going back to age 16, I can remember my personal story. It was not easy either. It just goes to show that we are all normal in this House and we all have feelings.

This motion is about not having confidence in CHI. It is as simple as that. I suspect that the majority if not all the parents of those kids who are affected are probably sitting on the same bench as us.

I did a lot of work on protected disclosures, and one of the big things with protected disclosures was flipping the reversal of the burden of proof. I still feel that you are punished in society in this country if you tell the truth or try to help people. You get absolutely battered for it. That is how rotten this society is. What has happened to these kids is absolutely rotten. I will not spare my words. You would not do it to a dog. You just would not do it to an animal. We are on about who has confidence in what. Nobody is being held accountable for this. I can remember, going back a number of years, the same procedure, the double hip operation. It is called a hip spica. You are in an arched timber cast. The HSE had one hip spica chair in the country, so any other child who came out after that chair was gone got a beanbag. That is going back to 2016 or 2017. With the help of a friend, we sourced one at a cost of €800. We bought a child's chair so they could have comfort. We imported it from England, yet you can hire them for €40 a month.

A lot of things have gone wrong here. I genuinely have no words for why we have to discuss this, but somebody has to be held responsible for it. I just cannot imagine how parents are feeling. I am sick to the stomach, but it must be absolutely gut-wrenching that one second you are sitting at the steering wheel holding that wheel and your child is on your right and within a blink you are on the opposite side of that car and they are holding the steering wheel. Now you have no control. I plead with everybody in this House to work together to get this right.

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