Foster care scandal: Still an air of denial and defensiveness within the HSE

It matters because there is still an air of denial and defensiveness within the HSE about these issues, writes Fergus Finlay

I wrote here last week about Grace, a woman abused while the State had responsibility for her care. It was this newspaper that had highlighted her story, and I wanted to call her Grace because she is someone who has lived a life innocent of any wrongdoing. I’m glad that Grace came to be recognised over the last week as a person, a citizen who had been wronged, and not as a label, a statistic or a number.

In that piece last week I wrote that “if I was health minister, I would (I hope) regard it as my paramount duty to find out what happened to Grace and how it happened. I hope I would demand that every scrap of paper relating to Grace’s treatment was delivered to my office, and I hope I wouldn’t rest until I got to the bottom of how this was allowed to happen to a defenceless fellow citizen”.