Ministerial P45 needed for health of country

“YOU’RE damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t,” said one senior HSE official yesterday when asked why it chose a Dáil committee as the means of informing almost 600 women in the midlands that they may not be clear of breast cancer as they had been led to believe.

He was wrong. The HSE could only be damned for doing it the way that it did it. It was appalling. Instead of doing the decent thing — personally informing the 97 women who have been recalled for surgical review — the executive went ahead and blurted it out at a Dáil committee.

So the unfortunate women found out about it via the airwaves. And that torpor of thinking was compounded when the HSE admitted it was beginning to send out letters to the women only today — rather than phoning them. That was disgraceful.