Chronicle of a death foretold: we cannot stand idly by as lives like brave Susie’s are sacrificed to system

WE write in the aftermath of a death foretold, the unnecessary death of a young Kilkenny mother from cancer.

In her life, as in her death, Susie Long highlighted a fundamental human right

— access to a decent health service. She bore witness to the obscenity of our four-tier health service — one for the rich, another for the less-well-off, one for city dwellers, another for the rest. She was crystal clear about why her cancer had been allowed to progress: it was because she had been let down by a health system the Government refuses to fund properly — the public health system.