Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am up to my ears with work, so I was not going to come to the Chamber, but I heard Senator Clonan's contribution and felt I needed to do so. If this is going to be one of the last times I speak in this House, I need to say that whatever happens in the next Administration, the issue of the culture in the HSE has to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck. I have to hand a copy of a letter that came in earlier from someone living in the constituency in which I am going to run. Because the person has advocated for a member of her family, the response from the HSE indicates she may be removed as the person legally entitled to speak for her family member and the HSE is going to make an application for a decision-making representative in her place. Other families who have stood up where a person with a disability is taken into the care of the State have not been allowed video calls with them and have been ostracised and excluded, and the minute they raise a problem with that, the HSE trots off to solicitors to get injunctions, to issue defamation proceedings and so on. It would suit the HSE better to actually do its job in providing facilities and services to these people instead of expending millions of euro of taxpayers' money on legal bills to try to silence those who speak up for the most vulnerable.

Whatever happens after the election, whoever is Minister for Health in any future Administration has to deal with the HSE and stop this nonsense, this absolute travesty of its role as public servants, whereby it behaves like this. The next Minister has to grab this culture, change it and deal with it, and the people in the HSE have to be accountable in the same way as anyone in the private sector. They have to be at risk of losing their jobs for threatening this type of rubbish. I have had it. I previously received a letter asking me to rectify the record of the House after I had lawfully stood up, under parliamentary privilege, and raised the issues of a family, only to have the HSE, instead of actually delivering for that family, say I should correct the record of the House. The cheek of the HSE to behave like that. Whatever happens, we need this to be solidly addressed in the next Administration. I hope I will be part of it, in some form or another, but whoever is sitting on the Government Front Bench in the Dáil needs to make sure they deal with this and put an end to the bullying of families in this country.