Health crisis - Harney must take blame for failures

SO, THE LADY is not for turning. Surprise, surprise.

It was inevitable that Health Minister Mary Harney would dismiss the near-universal calls for her resignation on foot of Thursday’s revelations that nearly 600 women must endure having their cancer tests revisited, and that at least 100 of those will get a call — whenever it might come — telling them that all is not well.That resignation call to Ms Harney would have been universal if RTÉ had not corralled a chorus line of pliant Fianna Fáil backbenchers to do what backbenchers do — sing the party line in perfect harmony. One of that cannon-fodder chorus — Dara Calleary from Mayo — went so far as to assert that Ms Harney “does not have ultimate responsibility for the matter”.

Who does then? The Sugar Plum Fairy? Maybe it’s George Clooney — after all, he was a doctor in ER.

The depth of the crisis facing Ms Harney was exacerbated by yesterday afternoon’s appalling, heartless performance by Mary Culliton, the HSE’s “director of consumer affairs” — presumably that’s dealing with patients’ needs — on RTÉ’s radio news.

She declared almost proudly, as if the HSE had nothing to be ashamed of, that two specialist nurses would phone the women who needed further assessment after everyone else had been informed. Two nurses? More or less 100 phone calls of the most distressing kind? Two nurses?

She also suggested that women should wait to be phoned rather than ringing a swamped, unhelpful helpline. So, you’re at home worried that you might have cancer, and you’re supposed to sit watching Emmerdale waiting for the phone to ring — whenever one of the two misfortunate nurses gets around to you?

Another aspect of the sorry episode is the fact that the director of the National Hospitals Office, John O’Brien, thought it acceptable to announce to a Dáil Committee that ultrasound assessments were being reviewed — before the women involved were told, and before, we are led to believe, the minister and HSE boss, Professor Brendan Drumm, were told.

Apart from the callousness it reveals it also shows that this manager did not think it worthwhile or proper to ensure that both the minister and Prof Drumm knew of the ultrasound reassessments. It revealed a complete lack of respect for the notion of responsibility to an elected authority. This recurring theme seems to be one of the core issues all across our dysfunctional health system.

It most pointedly reveals a complete lack of respect for the person of the minister and her obligations. In football terms, it shows that she’s lost the dressing room.

It would not happen in business, but if it did the consequences would be immediate and non-negotiable.

Some years ago a retiring American Ambassador to Ireland was asked if anything disappointed him about the Irish. “Yes,” he replied, “they have no sense of outrage, the kind of outrage needed to put things right.” In the context of this scandal, and the litany of others that preceded it, it is difficult to imagine how he might answer that question today.

There is an element of personal tragedy for Ms Harney in all of this. It is difficult to watch a decent and dignified person struggling to continually hide incompetence and indifference — in effect to have to apologise for her staff — behind the shield of promised reforms. Though she has a mountain to climb, and a job every senior Fianna Fáil minister dreads, part of the reforms she so ardently advances has to be the reassertion of control over the HSE by our elected representatives and her own removal from the process.

Calls for a minister’s resignation are all too common in the Punch-and-Judy, knock-and-drag of politics, but in this sorry instance anything less is unacceptable. Again we say: Like it or not minister, the buck stops with you and it’s time you — and a few HSE managers — were gone.