Dónal Walsh shouldn’t have had to endure such a poor health service

DÓNAL Walsh will be buried today having fought two battles in his short life — one with cancer and one with our health service.

Politicians have been paying tribute to the Kerry teenager since he passed away on Sunday, but they should be hanging their heads in shame at what he had to endure for the past four years.

Just 12 when he was first diagnosed with cancer, Dónal quickly learned that sick children are not a priority for Irish governments. Confused and in shock after learning he had a tumour, Dónal later wrote that those first few weeks were filled with excruciating pain.

“I was in so much pain, I had gone weeks with only hours of sleep and countless different medications but nothing would stop it,” he wrote in the Sunday Independent.

While doctors and nurses did their best to treat the disease and relieve his suffering, they could not relieve the cramped, dangerous and undignified conditions of Crumlin Children’s Hospital. They could not stop the paint peeling from the walls, remove the brown stains from the floors or extend his room so his parents no longer had to sleep on the floor.

They could not give him an en suite toilet so that, when he was at his weakest and most vulnerable to infection, he didn’t have to use a bedpan or summon up all of his strength and try to make it down the hall to the public toilets.

They could not take away the sense of dread he felt every time he knew he had to make the round trip from Kerry to Dublin, or “to hell” as he called it, for his chemo treatment. They could not take away the memory of the worst day in his life. Watching a baby boy die in the bed beside him and hearing the anguished screams of his parents as they desperately tried to resuscitate him.

Any child witnessing something like that, and knowing they too are fighting for their lives, would want their parents there to comfort them, but Dónal had to lie in that bed for an hour before his parents were allowed in.

This is the Ireland of the 21st century, where €250,000 was spent refurbishing a government office in 2007, in which “lower grade toilet paper should be avoided”, while dying children crammed into overcrowded wards watch babies die.

“It really does make me ashamed of my government when they can get wages in the hundreds of thousands annually,” the 16-year-old wrote, “but when one of the most important children’s wards in Ireland, for some of the sickest kids in Ireland, has to rely on charitable donations to buy a bucket of paint and a brush. That is one of the sickest things I have ever come across in my short lifetime here.”

Now politicians are talking about how brave Dónal was, and he was brave. But it was no thanks to them. He was brave in spite of them and their broken promises and their bureaucracy.

Most of us, stumbling through life with our petty concerns, have no comprehension of just how brave he was. To twice be given the all clear from cancer and each time to fight back just to have his hopes and dreams dashed and the pain start all over again.

But Dónal was also angry. And he had every right to be. His anger never developed into bitterness or self-pity but he knew it wasn’t right that, in one of the richest countries in the world, he was being treated in third world conditions.

He wasn’t just angry on his own behalf. He was angry on behalf of every child who is treated in Crumlin’s Dickensian conditions. Do the politicians lining up to laud Dónal today have anything to say about the fact that desperately-ill children, worn out from fighting cancer and other life-threatening diseases, are the ones being tasked with raising money for health services?

Do they care that sick little kids and their exhausted families are being sent out to shake buckets, and stand for hours packing grocery bags, because our government won’t adequately fund their care? Dónal raised €50,000, a lasting legacy to his tenacity and generosity. But he spent far too much time thinking about his illness.

Those brief, carefree periods when he was in remission from cancer, and rid of the disease, should have been spent being a teenager, a student, a friend, a son and a brother. Not a charity worker.

He should not have had to spend what little time he had raising money for Crumlin so that other children would not have to endure the torment that he did. The fact that he did is an indictment of a country that pours billions into banks while sick children suffer.

The horrible, cruel disease he had stripped him of so much. But our health service, instead of fully supporting him, stripped him of so much more. And he is not alone.

Every year 160 children are diagnosed with cancer and they are all treated at Crumlin. The new national children’s hospital was supposed to open this year, but, instead, the latest revised estimate is that it will be some time in 2017 before it will be completed. That delay means that at least 800 children fighting cancer, children who aren’t even born yet, will be put through the same ordeal that Dónal was.

Thousands of other seriously ill children face the same fate. Every year Crumlin performs 550 open-heart surgeries yet doctors have described having to remove rubbish bins from rooms so they have enough space to accommodate life-saving equipment beside children’s beds.

IT’S not just Crumlin that is short of money. Last week, a two-year-old boy who fell from a second-floor window in Mallow died after his parents were told that there was no ambulance to take him to the hospital.

Is this the level to which the health service has sunk? Ambulances can no longer be found to transport children to hospital? How can anyone be confident this won’t happen again?

Meanwhile, how likely is it that the new national children’s hospital will be opened when the Health Minister James Reilly says it will, considering all of the delays, planning problems and turf wars that have beset the project to date? These fears were especially pronounced earlier this year when Mr Reilly sacked the board managing the project and left the positions vacant, and the scheme in limbo, for over two months.

Dónal Walsh was an amazing young man who, through his anti-suicide campaign, saved lives and, through his grace and courage in the face of adversity, taught us all a lesson in how to live.

If the minister, and anyone else in government, really wants to pay tribute to Dónal’s memory then, instead of uttering a few trite sound bytes, they could give a guarantee.

Make a commitment that the new children’s hospital will be opened when they say it will and that health services for the most vulnerable, including mental health patients, will be improved and properly funded without delay.