Letters to the Editor: HSE's safeguarding plan is a joke
While families like the Murrays fight to put services in place before they die, we built a successful framework over a decade ago only to watch it collapse over the last two years because we dared to complain about ruthless actors.
Reading the recent articles in the Irish Examiner on HSE disability services only raises more issues and questions.
The outsourcing of home support to profiteering private entities. Paid millions by the State, these actors deliver appalling standards in services. Vulnerable people with neuro-disabilities suffer in silence, knowing that to complain is to risk losing their service entirely.
This is exactly what is happening to our family. We refused to stay silent when our son was put at risk by poor care. The HSE safeguarding is a joke. The HSE examining complaints against itself or against service providers it commissions.
The resulting safeguarding plan is not provided to the complainant, if it ever existed in the first place. It’s data protected. There is no oversight and no accountability. Nobody is responsible for anything.
The original commitment to a wrap-around service — featuring consistent staff trained in neuro-disability, physiotherapy, and occupational therapy — has been completely watered down. Now, we struggle to even get anyone to show up.
After fighting for 40 years for our son’s independence in his own home, he is now being told he must go into respite? Or a residential centre for a three-month placement miles away from his family and community because the service provider wants out and the HSE doesn’t have any suitable services available?
Yes, despite that huge budget, there’s no service available. We know that, if we allow him to leave, he will never return home. We’ve seen it all before. How is this person-centric or compliant with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD)?
While families like the Murrays fight to put services in place before they die, we built a successful framework over a decade ago only to watch it collapse over the last two years because we dared to complain about ruthless actors.
The Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Act 2015 has been weaponised against the very people it was meant to protect.
Care has become a commercial commodity contracted to the lowest bidder.
The State has failed to implement the UNCRPD. Our most vulnerable are being abused and abandoned for profit.
A few TDs shouting in the Dáil before their summer recess will not fix this.
The Irish Examiner will run a few articles, followed by silence. For shame.
After nearly 40 years, we are still left with no real neuro-disability services, no hope, and a State failing the most vulnerable.
Name and address with the editor
Grind schools make up unfair share of comments
As a post-primary principal, I kept a tally during the recent exam fortnight of who was quoted on the Leaving Certificate papers. The pattern was hard to miss: Almost every named commentator came from a grind school or a commercial revision website. Roughly seven in 10.
The teachers of the recognised schools that educate the overwhelming majority of the country’s students were barely heard at all.
This is no small thing. Grind schools and revision sites sit entirely outside the State’s system — not inspected, not bound by the curriculum, not answerable to the department. Yet paper after paper, on the national broadcaster and across our newspapers, they were handed the microphone and introduced by their brand names. Free airtime. Free advertising. In the very weeks parents are deciding where to spend their money.
The point is not that these teachers are unregistered — most are perfectly qualified. The point is the standing of the institution they speak for. We would not put a doctor onto the airwaves to advise on public health in the name of an unrecognised clinic, however able the doctor.
The issue is the regulation of the practice, not the competence of the individual.
So why, on an exam affecting some 60,000 young people a year, do we let unrecognised schools supply almost all the expertise — and pay them in publicity for it?
The unions maintain subject spokespeople for exactly this purpose. The recognised schools are full of teachers who could speak to any paper. They might, just occasionally, be asked.
Nathan Barrett
Principal of Stratford College, Rathgar, Dublin 6
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel on housing policy
I wish to commend Elaine Loughlin for her very insightful article on last Saturday’s edition ( "Could Singapore’s state-led housing model work in Ireland?", June 27).
I am often befuddled and bewildered as to why the Government fails to draw on successful housing policies elsewhere.
Singapore’s housing model is driven by the Housing and Development Board, a statutory board that acts as the sole developer, architect, and regulator for the nations public housing. I find the board to be an emboldening entity in that it serves as the ultimate guardian of affordable homeownership, housing 80% of its resident population.
It’s important to remember that these homes are sold at subsidised prices and are often planned alongside transport links, green spaces, and other amenities.
I am particularly drawn to the notion that Singapore’s housing model is built around extensive government development. I believe that consistency of government and the ability to implement long-term planning strategies without changes in policy is key to this country’s success.
I also note that the State owns almost 90% of all the land.
The Singaporean government also has this strong ability to control and manage the market.
As a clinician, I have always asserted that copying and replicating validated models is a proven accelerator for learning and innovation.
I believe that it saves one from reinventing the wheel, setting a strong baseline before one iterates same.
I have to ask why our government and particularly our Department of Housing isn’t investigating fully the successful Singaporean housing policy.
If something works, why are we not replicating such success?
I find the concluding words of Ms Loughlin’s column to be a most sagacious observation on her part: “In recent years, concerns have also been raised around affordability due to increasing re-sale values, which jumped post-covid, when the usual level of construction was stalled. But Singapore has created a model that provides affordable homes to the majority of the population, something that is akin to a fever dream in this country.”
John O’Brien
Clonmel, Tipperary
An Óige shows path forward
Regarding your recent article on pilgrim trails, there is tremendous staycation potential here. We have nearly 1m new Irish who know little about our monastic and European heritage, but we need a more visionary approach which the An Óige movement provides.
The B&B concept is now very expensive, with €120 per night for couple ... more imaginative options need to be offered with an emphasis on communal experience and lower cost and education.
To avoid bureaucracy and encourage innovation voluntary groups, there should be grant aided to explore planning and delivery for individual walks.
Planning from Dublin should be avoided. When best practice is identified and delivered, it can then get support from Dublin. The concept has many features: Health, social, communal, as well as economic.
Joseph Keating
Delgany, Wicklow
Benefits don’t reach workers
The weekend newspapers reported that the Government is providing the hospitality industry with a €650m taxpayer-funded package from July 1, 2026.
Industry representatives have been effusive in their praise for what they describe as a vital lifeline, highlighting the success of their lobbying efforts in securing this funding.
What is striking, however, is that the minister with responsibility for tourism, Peter Burke TD, failed to remind the hotel and catering industry that it withdrew a lifeline from its own workers when it went to the courts to abolish the joint labour committees. Those committees gave catering workers and their representatives a voice in regulating pay and conditions of employment.
This is the same hospitality industry that refused the Government and the Dáil’s request to participate in the newly established National Joint Labour Committee to negotiate and regulate pay and conditions for catering and hotel workers.
It appears that when the Government distributes hundreds of millions of euro in taxpayers’ money — money largely contributed by PAYE workers — to employers, the benefits do not extend to the more than 250,000 workers in the hospitality sector, many of whom are among the lowest paid in the country. Is it any wonder that industry spokespeople are celebrating the success of their lobbying campaign?
Norman Croke
Straffan, Kildare
So much for free voting
With around 77% of people favouring a ban on hare coursing, according to a Red C poll, it’s truly heartbreaking to learn that the Government will oppose the People Before Profit bill that aims to protect the Irish hare from cruelty.
It has also ruled out a free vote for its TDs. So much for Tánaiste Simon Harris’s statement that TDs should be allowed more free votes on issue of conscience.
The Government says it opposes the bill because a ban would not be supported by “the best independent scientific evidence”.
Exactly what evidence is needed to demonstrate that hare coursing is cruel?
A hare weighs about 3.5kg, and a typical adult greyhound between 27-40kg.
It doesn’t take a genius to deduce that a greyhound coming into forceful contact with a hare on a coursing field at high speed packs a fair punch.
Reports filed by observers from the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) from coursing events reveal hares are mauled, pinned to the ground, or tossed into the air by dogs.
How sad that this gentle creature, a native mammal that survived the Ice Age of 10,000 years ago, has to continue running from dogs.
But coursing is on borrowed time, perceived by most people now as a blot on the sporting calendar.
Someday, a government with guts will ban it.
John Fitzgerald
Callan, Kilkenny
