Responsibility shirked - HSE officials must be accountable

Controversy has arisen over a decision by the Health Service Executive (HSE) to notify the Newstalk Radio station that it will no longer furnish it with press releases, process inquiries, grant interviews, or advertise with the station. The HSE accuses the station of bullying junior clerical staff by putting them on air.

This is a naked attempt by senior officials to shirk their own responsibilities. Senior officials are fobbing off their duties onto junior officials and then behaving with mock indignation, because the junior officials feel intimidated at being unable to answer questions. It is the senior officials who are responsible for the bullying, because they are shirking their responsibility to act in an accountable manner.

Worse, government ministers are essentially supporting this contemptible attitude by refusing to grant interviews. This sinister behaviour is the height of contemptible arrogance.

In a democracy people elect politicians to represent them by ensuring that the civil servants implement the will of the people as a whole, not the whims or dictates of some senior officials.

What we are witnessing is a perversion of the democratic process.

The HSE is using public money and there should be no question of its staff being allowed to use that money to puff themselves up by dictating how news outlets should cover health stories. No self-respecting news outlet would tolerate such behaviour.

If the news media ever allow themselves to become a tool of the public relations industry, our democracy will be in the deepest trouble. The involvement of the HSE should set the alarm bells ringing all the louder, because it spends more than any other government agency. There are also grounds for suspecting it squanders more money than any of the other agencies, with the result that there is a need for vigilance on the part the public and politicians.

Despite ever increasing budgets, the waiting lists continue. In recent days there was the scandal of the two solicitors who had a secret bank account into which they spirited money to evade tax. In just three-and-a-half years the two solicitors squirrelled away €32 million, much of which apparently came from health boards.

It is easy to understand how the cost of those health boards was unsustainable and why they were amalgamated into the HSE. It would be nice to think that such a thing could not happen again, but we have had no explanation about how they were paid so much money in the first place.

Thorough vigilance is necessary, but that will be impossible if the HSE and ministers are allowed to shirk their responsibility by not being held publicly answerable.