Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)

When we read the report words kind of fail us. We have heard words over the last number of days such as "shocked" and "disgraceful" from parents who are dealing with the anger and the emotion. As my party colleague, Deputy Mary Lou McDonald, mentioned earlier, one parent felt they had let their child down. This is an emotion expressed by many of the parents I have spoken to. It is the wrong emotion because it was not they who let their child down; it was the State, it was the system, it was CHI, it was Temple Street and Cappagh hospitals, it was governance and, I would argue, it was the Government. We are used to hearing about scandals and about reports but when we are talking about numbers, we must remember that 80% of the operations at Cappagh hospital were not necessary and 60% in Temple Street hospital, and every single one of those involved a child. We are talking about hundreds of little girls and little boys who went into an operating theatre, who had serious and invasive surgery carried out on their hips and who are learning how to walk again. A bit of their childhood was stolen from them. We are not talking about one, two or three: we are talking about hundreds and hundreds of children. How did this go on not for one year or two years but likely for quite a number of years? We know of parents who went for second opinions and the consultants told them they did not need the operation as the child did not even have the condition and said words, which were relayed back to me, such as, "We are alarmed at what is happening in Dublin". How was none of this noticed? Over the years my colleagues on these benches have been raising different issues in relation to CHI and governance issues so why did the Government not take a deep dive into CHI and actually looked at what was going on? When the leaked report came out, I stood here two months ago to say to the Government to get ahead of this. This is a scandal the likes of which we have never seen. Even today there are parents in my constituency of Donegal as well as right throughout the State who do not know when they will have that independent analysis assessment so they may know whether or not their child needed that operation. How is it that over those two months one parent sent 30 emails with no response, only to get a response when they threatened legal action? Does the Minister know the response the parent received last week? It was that they would be in touch with the parent in the coming months. This is a disgrace. It is a disgrace of governance, it is a failure of practitioners and it is a failure of the Government to get ahead of this issue and to deal with it when it was brought to its attention quite a number of months ago.

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