Marie Sherlock (Dublin Central, Labour)

I express my concern about and thoughts for the individuals and staff in the care home in Donaghmede where a very serious incident happened earlier this afternoon.

It is a dangerous business in politics when you get people’s hopes up and overpromise and underdeliver. The reason we are here today is because of those commitments that the Tánaiste made when he was the Minister for Health back in 2017. I do not doubt the sincerity of his intentions then, but the clear reason for the failure with regard to that commitment is Fine Gael in government supported by Fianna Fáil, failing to ensure a functioning Children’s Health Ireland and a functioning series of paediatric hospitals that then went on to become CHI such that we have an inappropriate system of care for the most vulnerable children in our State. This arises because of a failure of corporate governance, a failure of clinical governance and a failure of management. The buck stops with the previous Government and this one in terms of how children have been repeatedly failed. This has been a failure by the Government to grasp the issues within the hospital to ensure that the board of CHI, as it then was, and the boards of the individual hospitals actually lived up to their responsibilities and ensured proper care for those children.

I want to look forward and ensure that the legacy of Harvey Morrison Sherratt and all the other children who have been failed is that those children currently waiting for care get the service and therapy they so badly deserve and need.

Harvey is only one of a large number of children. I think of Dollceana Carter and all the other children whose names we do not want to bring into the Chamber because those families have suffered in silence and want to retain the privacy of their grief and suffering. Those children are being failed because they are being left in operable. Those families have been put through agony for far longer than they ever should have. They have been failed in terms of the anxiety that has been imposed upon them because of the promise after promise that has not been lived up to. Those failures continue in terms of the 129 children that are waiting for surgery and have yet to get their scheduled operations and the children who were told there would be treatment abroad in New York or London. We see so few, if any, being offered that. There are very serious questions for this Government in terms of the initiatives that we have been told are being taken to try to reduce the waiting lists and the failure to take them up, particularly with regard to treatment abroad.

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