Letters to the Editor: Disability services still a distant dream

It seems as if disability is perennially ditched to the margins of healthcare coverage.

Children’s Disability Services are, sadly, yet again under a very negative spotlight. Many national and local media conduits are covering the shameful dearth of therapeutic service delivery to some of the neediest scenarios prevailing anywhere in the country. It seems as if disability is perennially ditched to the margins of healthcare coverage, with a continuous lack of comprehensive and compassionate care coupled with appropriate therapeutic intervention being made promptly available. The current impasse is simply the newest incarnation of a permanently pervasive dilatoriness with the recently constituted Children's Disability Network Teams (CDNTs) on a hiding to nothing trying to deliver anything like an efficient service.

Having worked for many years as a clinical music therapist (MT) in learning disability and ASD therapeutic programmes alongside SLT and OT professionals, I’m keenly aware of the urgency of timely intervention. Child developmental and emotional/behavioural issues wait for no one, and require urgent amelioration. While the current stagnant CDNT service delivery impasse is totally regrettable, it is the direct result of a crazed bureaucratic swamp designed only to stymie any realistic delivery of appropriate practical services on the ground.

Sadly, the current ongoing reconfiguration of services via children disability national teams countrywide is going through disturbing developmental pangs itself, with the crystallising of individual therapeutic supports at a premium while the new template is in transformational progress. Basic operational transfers of managerial
responsibility, therapeutic team assimilation and fundamental classification/prioritising of waiting lists/
assessments etc are apparently proving continuously challenging for all sorts of fluctuating administrative dynamics across all levels of the relevant HSE strands of accountability. Change, it seems, is a rocky, potholed road, especially if everyone involved is not fully playing fair and honest ball as a combined ‘team’ towards the one and same positive result, ie the actual hands-on delivery.

This is indeed strange, given that the new system has been laboriously hatched over the past five years or more, yet is still struggling to materialise with any degree of convincing
urgency. There would appear to be an unrealistic expectation from many in the higher echelons of the HSE far
removed from the clinical coal-face, as well as political players who like to trumpet their complaints’ game to curry profile, irrespective of the on-the-ground reality and the many challenges abounding. Therapist ‘boots-on-the-ground’ remains a key stumbling block in the midst of an ongoing tsunami of need.

All this to say nothing of the erstwhile ‘mixum-gatherum’ complexion of disability services which boasts a motley selection of Section 39 agencies, HSE primary care teams, and now the new CDNT delivery teams all vying for various degrees of ownership and executive reach. Such a contorted melange can only lead to an inherently strained dynamic, auguring poorly for efficiently smooth service delivery. Thus a worthy public-healthcare therapeutic schema for children with disability still seems a distant dream, if not a mirage. Is it all a ruse to push people in desperation towards the private healthcare conduits of care (as that is what it does)?

All this underlines yet another example of the ponderously amorphous characteristic of the monolithic HSE ‘organism’, failing regularly on service delivery protocols/deadlines etc, without any degree of clarity, coherence, or comfort, it inhabits a place where transparent administrative
accountability at the higher executive levels is regularly in short supply.

Plus ca change, it seems.

Jim Cosgrove

Lismore

Co Waterford

Ernest Shackleton's ship  Endurance which has not been seen since it was crushed by the ice and sank in the Weddell Sea in 1915.

Endurance has lived up to her famous name

It is great news for those of us interested in the Endurance22 expedition that on March 9, 2022, they announced they had located the 144 ft, three-masted wooden ship; lost for over 106 years, 10,000 feet beneath the Weddell sea, east of the Antarctic peninsula and four miles south of her last location recorded by her captain, Frank Worsley, in 1915. This year is the 100th anniversary of Ernest Shackleton’s death on January 5, 1922. He died on his final Antarctic expedition and was buried there at his wife’s request.

John Shears, Endurance22 leader, said how they had made polar history with the discovery of Endurance and in successfully completing the world’s most challenging shipwreck search.

The search area was 150 sq miles and made possible with a $10m donation to the expedition by an anonymous donor. A polar research ship, S.A. Agulhas II, with two submersibles, searched the seabed twice a day, for six hours at a time and with sonar also. It took four weeks to find the ship — an amazingly short time from when they left South Africa on February 5.

It must have been emotional for the team to see ‘Endurance’ on the stern, and the ship is very well preserved. There are no wood-eating organisms in those icy seas. There is more symbolism with the large star under its name. The ship was launched in Norway in 1912. It was previously named ‘Polaris’, meaning ‘pole star’, and the star was placed underneath. The name later changed to Endurance.

The significance of it being found is that it was part of the 1914-17 Shackleton expedition to the Antarctic. When trapped in ice, her crew and captain and Shackleton miraculously survived terrible conditions and all 27 men and Ernest Shackleton came home. This was made possible by the tremendous courage of Shackleton and some of the crew going for help in a small, wooden boat across 720 nautical miles of treacherous, mountainous, freezing seas for the men left behind to be rescued. It is described by historian Dan Snow, who is on this expedition, as the greatest survival story in history.

Shackleton and the crew would be pleased and proud of this generation who located their ship lost and now found. She is a historical site under the terms of the Antarctic Treaty and can not be moved or disturbed.

I am looking forward to Dan Snow’s documentary on it.

Mary Sullivan

College Rd

Cork

The price hikes are going into the pockets of companies and individuals who are lining their pockets

Fuel companies lining their pockets

It is interesting that the Government in their announcement of a cut in the price of diesel and petrol says that it has no control over the enormous increase in prices following the invasion of Ukraine.

The Government omit to say that price hikes do not evaporate into thin air. The price hikes are going into the pockets of companies and individuals who are lining their pockets on the suffering of the people of Ukraine.

The Government and the EU can name and shame those who are
exploiting their economic position by rising prices without concern for the impact on civil society and in particular, the most vulnerable.

Norman A. Croke

Straffan

Co Kildare

Why Catholics don’t go to Mass

The reason why parents baptise their children into the Catholic Church almost as quickly as they are born is, I
believe, probably because such parents don’t take any organised religious practices very seriously at all.

One indication of this lack of belief in Catholic religious practices by Catholic parents is a 2011 survey showing that fewer than one in five Dublin Catholics went to Mass every week.

If Catholic parents truly did take their religious practices seriously, they probably would observe them a lot more often themselves. They might also consider it important to seek for some real say in how the Catholic Church is run, too. They might look for such a say, not just for their own spiritual concerns, but also because they truly love their own children and because they really do care about their children’s future spiritual and moral development into adulthood.

Whenever Catholic parents in the future should attain some real say in the running of their Church, they might then well have a query about any Church enacted ruling which restricts their own children freedom of conscience as adults from choosing to leave the Catholic Church?

Sean O’Brien

Kilrush

Co Clare

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 Ukrainian emergency employees and volunteers carry an injured pregnant woman from the damaged by shelling maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine.Picture: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP/Shutterstock

Peace is the answer

The bombing, and destruction, of a hospital, especially a maternity hospital, is horrendous and without doubt a war crime. No one can justify this.

The lack of concern from Putin shows his character and how wrong his actions are.

Someone has to stop Putin, by economics, pressure, isolation, condemnation, but not by violence as there has already been too much violence.

Support and pray for Ukraine, but don’t fight — let peace win.

Dennis Fitzgerald

Vic Melbourne

Australia