Ministers’ call for resignation: What pathetic grandstanding

Yesterday’s Cabinet meeting heard calls from three ministers — Children’s Minister Katherine Zappone, Rural Affairs Minister Michael Ring, and Disabilities Minister Finian McGrath — for HSE chief Tony O’Brien to resign over the cancer-screening scandal.

The call is pathetically hollow.

Mr O’Brien is about to retire and any suggestion that he, or anyone else, might have undone decades of mismanagement, especially political mismanagement, during the few years he was HSE chief, is as delusional as it is dishonest.

It just deepens the cynicism undermining the remaining confidence in the HSE and the relationship between our health service and those we elect to administer it.

An Áras Attracta report today is the last on the ongoing failures of the HSE-run home in Swinford, Co Mayo.

It will not get the same attention, even though the home has been the subject of one excoriating report after another, since 2014.

The home has had 14 Hiqa inspections since July, 2015.

Mr Ring, who called for Mr O’Brien’s resignation yesterday, is a local TD.

Entrusting a vulnerable person to an institution like Áras Attracta requires huge trust, so how much better it would have been if the ministers, one of whom — Finian McGrath — has responsibility in this area, had insisted that Mr O’Brien do his job and remove Áras Attracta management.

Once again, we get grandstanding, where real action is required.