Irish Examiner View: In Ireland's public service, customers are the last to be told

Public-serving organisations should become more cusomter-focused when it comes to data and transparency.

Cork University Maternity Hospital. Picture: Denis Minihane.

Two contemporary examples underline the serious mismatch between organisations which exist to support the interests and rights of citizens and their warped sense of what constitutes service, transparency, and effective communications in the difficult times we face.

Families whose babies’ organs were sent abroad for incineration without their knowledge more than two years ago are still waiting to find out why it happened. Covid has become the catch-all excuse for a plethora of failures but there has been no proper national accounting and audit of the management and cost and consequences of the pandemic. But that is a subject for another time.

It is not as if there are no theories and explanations about the precise detail of how the remains of 18 deceased babies came to be sent from Cork University Hospital to Antwerp. 

A draft copy of the investigation, already a year overdue, exists. It is just that the distraught families have not been allowed to see it. Others, operating at least one remove, if not more, from the grief have had the benefit of the insight the draft provides. This is plain wrong, and lacking in compassion, by whatever criterion you apply.

Meanwhile, we learn that the child and family agency, Tusla, have spent more than €400,000 hiring consultants to blank out information in personal data requests, including from survivors of the mother and baby homes.

Data protection responsibilities are something that governments, European and Irish, have dumped on organisations large and small without any true appreciation of the costs involved, so it might be anticipated that Tusla might wish to gather extra resource to deal with the task, although the fact that the job was not put out to tender adds a new dimension of worry. 

Tusla have a reputation for applying a very broad interpretation of what should be redacted, which has fuelled anxiety in people attempting to discover unknown background about their own lives.

Health Minister Stephen Donnelly has instituted a detailed performance management review of HSE hospitals. But perhaps it would be a good idea for all public-serving organisations to start each day with one simple reminder: “Who is the customer here?”