Child abuse probe - Why isn’t there more outrage?

The question should be asked if we have become so inured to the administrative bungling of the Health Service Executive (HSE) that there has not been more outrage at the latest development in relation to child abuse?

Emily Logan, the Ombudsman for Children, has suspended her investigation into the HSE’s handling of the Child Protection Audit of Catholic Church dioceses. The HSE had been failing to co-operate with the investigation, despite public and private assurances that it would and has been doing so.

In early January Ms Logan requested relevant documentation from the Department of Health and the HSE. “I’ve had no engagement and no provision of any information or documentation whatsoever from the HSE four months on,” she declared in an RTÉ interview. Ms Logan has quite properly been unwilling to waste taxpayers’ money in unnecessarily affirming the statutory rights of her office to investigate these matters. The HSE, on the other hand, is so overloaded with administrative staff that its level of bureaucratic incompetence appears to know no bounds.