Daniel McConnell: Suffering 10-year-old's surgery wait raises questions over Government's budget choices

Adam Terry has been waiting over four years for urgent scoliosis surgery. His mother, Christine said she will go to the ends of the earth for her son. Picture courtesy of Brian O'Connell

It didn’t sit well all day.

I was about to go on radio to discuss the Budget.

While I was getting ready in the Dáil studio, I listened in shock to the interview given by 10-year-old Cork boy Adam Terry.

A scoliosis sufferer, Adam told RTÉ reporter Brian O’Connell about what it is like to live in the chronic pain he has to endure daily as he waits for an operation to improve his life. Adam has been waiting more than four years for urgent surgery.

“It’s really sore and sometimes I have to lie down and roll around for it to actually stop,” he said.

He said he feels as though he is “at the bottom of the barrel”.

“Nobody is coming out to find me in the lost and found. To be honest, sometimes I feel like I’m crying myself to sleep because it’s so unfair. It just makes me angry and frustrated and sad.”

That description of feeling like being left in the lost and found bin was a thunderbolt of a statement for anyone to say, let alone a small boy.

In that context, the Government announced additional spending of €4.7bn in Budget 2022.

Such a level of spending means choices.

Choices about how the Government can help to radically improve people’s lives.

Lots of nice things were announced

Lots of nice things were announced – cheaper travel for young adults, pension top-ups and social welfare, more money for new teachers, a €1bn boost for health and on and on and on.

But still the image of young Adam wriggling in pain and crying himself to sleep was hard to shift.

What was more aggravating was the ‘nothing to see here, move along’ response from health officials who blamed Covid for impacting on Adam’s case.

They expressed regret that delays have been caused but in contrast to Adam’s piercing comments, it sounded cold, uncaring and frankly disgraceful.

This morning at about 11am, the People Before Profit group of TDs sought to give their reaction to Budget 2022, two hours before it had even been delivered.

Perhaps, their choice to speak ahead of the speeches came about because most, if not all of the €4.7bn budget measures had been reported upon in this newspaper and elsewhere in recent days.

Paul Murphy, who can’t ever seem to make up his mind as to which group he belongs to, did produce one decent line to describe his take on the budget, reducing it to what he called “National Fiver Day”.

The recent trend of stitching a €5 increase to the weekly State pension and other core social welfare was once again a feature in Budget 2022, even though Social Protection officials say time and time again it does little to impact poverty rates.

Mr Murphy’s accusation was that after the emergency of Covid-19 when the State stood up in an unprecedented manner, the coalition is rushing to return to a neo-liberal, market-driven set of policies which failed in the past.

Even before they took to their feet, ministers Paschal Donohoe and Michael McGrath were accused of seeking to give a nudge to every sector rather than spending the limited resources in a more meaningful, targeted way.

By trying to be all things to all men and women, you end up being nothing to anyone.

By giving a little to everyone in Budget 2022, the charge has been made that Donohoe and McGrath spread the goodies so thin, that it is of little or no benefit to anybody.

A Budget Day package of €4.7bn is not inconsiderable and it does include significant increases in some key departments such as health, social welfare and education.

Some ministers and their teams expressed “surprise and delight” in the run-up to the budget that McGrath had found hundreds of millions in extra money at the last minute to fund pet projects that were previously ruled out.

Tinkering around the edges

Whatever about the delight of ministers, Budget 2022 sadly has merely repeated the well-worn pattern of Governments tinkering around the edges of problems rather than grappling with serious problems.

Serious problems like scoliosis in children. Adam Terry is certainly not the only one who has been failed.

Last year’s budget saw massive increases in spending for many departments to offset the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, but in many cases ministers could not spend all the money they had.

This year, even though there is lots of money for lots of different things like free GP care for children under eight, 8,000 new health staff, schemes to retrofit thousands of homes, the big question is whether there are the workers there to deliver on such ambitions.

And if they are not at a time of a skills shortage, should the government not have sought to try and appease everyone but rather make some hard decisions and tackle a few core areas that need urgent attention.

Politically, it could be argued that McGrath and Donohoe crafted an astute budget aimed at stymieing Sinn Féin’s seemingly unstoppable journey toward being the lead party in the next government.

Unlike previous years, there were no obvious major clangers or landmines in the budget which led backbenchers to be upset.

Some were nonplussed, some were happy, but most agreed the two ministers did well in spreading out the cash.

When you think of the rows had in years gone by over whether the split between tax cuts and spending increases would be either on a 2:1 or 3:1 basis, that this year’s budget saw an 8:1 split between spending measures and tax cuts told its own story.

It led some in Government to beg the question – where is the Fine Gael input to it all?

“Are we all now socialists?” quipped one senior Fine Gael TD when asked for his response.

Had I not heard that interview this morning, I would have written a very different piece I am sure.

But, when you consider the choices made and not made in Budget 2022, the conclusion is not a favourable one at all.