Commentators who tell us of the HSE's litany of failures will turn around and argue it should be given more powers, writes JOHN WATERS
I’VE RACKED my brains about this and what I’ve come up with is that journalists believe there are two HSEs.
One is the organisation which, on a daily basis, the media tells us is incompetent, negligent and dysfunctional: an organisation that treats human life as a cheap commodity and avoidable deaths as something to be shrugged off as statistical marginalia. This HSE stands idly by while, under its very gaze, children are neglected, terrified and abused, and then spuriously invokes the constitutional rights of families so as to conceal from public scrutiny its own record of negligence and dereliction.
But then there is the other HSE, the one journalists tell us is disgracefully underfunded and in need of enhanced powers to carry out its great work.
Within a week or two, the same commentators and opinion-formers who this week have been assiduously analysing the Tallaght Hospital scandal, the Tracey Fay “tragedy”, the house of horrors that emerged in a recent case and the deaths of 23 children in a decade while in the care of the HSE, will go back to trying to bully the Irish electorate into dismantling our Constitution so as to confer virtual omnipotence in relation to intervening in Irish families on . . . the HSE.
I have to reveal to my colleagues today that there is only one HSE, an organisation whose almost total moral dereliction has been revealed in my postbag over many years. Because I have dared to confront the system in relation to its treatment of families, people in trouble tend to contact me. They write me their stories, full of grief and disbelief at what has befallen them on encountering the brutal face of this State’s remorseless systems of what, with a macabre irony, is called “child protection”. Invariably, if I manage to get past the lawyers with even the sketchiest of details of the abuses a family has suffered, I encounter the silent condescension of the rest of the media.
Within a short time, the Supreme Court will hand down a judgment in the case of a family I will call the “Lanes”. In giving the merest outline of this case, I must alter fundamental details so as to avoid running foul of the in camera rule, under which court proceedings may not be reported by the media.
“Alan” and “Mary” Lane have two small children who, as a result of the actions of the HSE, may shortly face forcible adoption in the UK. This case has a lengthy history in England, where the Lanes had lodged a number of complaints of medical negligence against the National Health Service.
It seems clear that, using as its basis for intervention injuries sustained by the mother while in NHS care, the local authority sought to take the Lane’s children into care, describing the parents as “dangerous and unstable”.
In fact, several attempts to have the couple psychiatrically diagnosed have resulted in them being deemed free of any psychiatric symptoms. Despite this, they have on several occasions had their children dragged screaming and crying from them.
The “substance” of the case made by the English authorities is that the couple are feigning illnesses (presumably to get compensation) and medicating their children. The Lanes have already succeeded in the English courts in disproving the case against them.
Following the first episode of their nightmare, however, the couple feared that their children were being abused while in foster care. They complained to the child protection authorities, a complaint which culminated in the social services beginning proceedings to have the children forcibly adopted. The family fled to Ireland. English social services sought the assistance of the HSE, requesting that the children be taken into emergency care. Initially the HSE appears to have resisted, but soon fell into line.
Over a year ago, the children were taken from their parents in an operation involving social workers from both jurisdictions and a dozen gardaí in four Garda cars. Eventually, the High Court ordered that the children be returned to England, the court having accepted the HSE argument that adoption was always a “last resort”. (In such case, the practice in the Irish courts is to assume that other countries’ procedures are above reproach.) The judge said that the adoption of the children was a possibility rather than a probability, and that the parents must trust the English courts to do what is in the best interests of the children.
If the Supreme Court vindicates this outlook, it is probable that the two children will be returned to the UK and may be separated and adopted by two different families, and may never see their parents again.
For the first nine months of their Irish nightmare, the parents were seeing their children for two hours every week, but since October last they have been denied contact and allowed only to speak to their children once a week by telephone.
This is how I see the HSE as revealed in my in-tray: incompetent, negligent and dysfunctional.