HER COURAGE BRINGS CHANGE
THERE she was. That long hair that she says her young son loves so much falling softly to her shoulders. Her cream-coloured top throwing light on her face, her bright pink jacket draped over the back of her chair. Vicky Phelan. Mother, daughter, wife, warrior.
But whatever about how Mrs Phelan looked yesterday when she appeared before the Public Accounts Committee, it was her demeanour that really left its mark. Poised. Resolute. Determined.
And angry? No, certainly not inyour-face anger, but perhaps just a flicker every now and again – when she mentioned Jerome Coffey, the director of the National Cancer Control Programme, and again when she talked about not being given the information about her condition. ‘MY information,’ she emphasised, her eyes flashing for just a moment.
And who on earth could blame her for that anger? For this, as we well know, is a woman whose life has been catastrophically changed. She is, as she said yesterday, now ‘full of cancer’, and through no fault of her own.
For Mrs Phelan was vigilant. She went for regular smear tests, even before CervicalCheck came into existence. She was responsible.
But those who were irresponsible, those who believed that coverup was more important than truth, that saving face (and money) was paramount, they let Mrs Phelan down. And Emma Mhic Mhathúna. And so many other women, some of them still with us and fighting for their lives, others already gone, leaving devastated spouses and partners and children and parents and siblings behind.
We now know so much more about the CervicalCheck scandal than we did in the days after Mrs Phelan first went public in the wake of her court settlement.
We know, indeed, that this was no solo run by the CervicalCheck boss Gráinne Flannelly, who at least had the decency to step aside relatively quickly when details of the debacle began to emerge.
WE know too that Tony O’Brien, then head of the HSE, also knew. And that Tony Holohan, the chief medical officer, was also in receipt of that damning memo from March 2016. So, yes, he knew too. As did other various – and still not all named – Department of Health employees.
They all knew, this secret circle of silent conspirators, as they passed memos among themselves, drawing attention to this and that before passing the ball to the doctors, saying that it was up to them to tell – or not to tell – the women in question.
‘No blood on our hands’ would seem like the prime motivation.
So they didn’t make the information public or tell us, the people who pay their wages. They didn’t even tell their boss, the Minister for Health. Something as potentially catastrophic as this information comes to light, and you don’t tell the person at the top?
Who, you’d have to ask yourself, did these people think they were? Who were they to play God with women’s lives?
The kindest interpretation possible is that the reason that those in the know decided to keep it under wraps is they didn’t want to damage the credibility of the CervicalCheck programme.
Even if that is true – and I’m not sure that I buy that as the reason – it is no excuse.
Cover-up, lies, withholding the truth – call it what you will – is never the answer.
‘Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive,’ wrote Walter Scott in his epic 19th-century poem, Marmion.
And what applied back then still applies today. Truth will out. The problem, though, is that, in this case, it came out too late.
Also at issue, of course, is the public’s perception of the CervicalCheck programme.
Take incompetence out of the equation, and remove too, for a moment, the cover-up that we have witnessed here, and just look at the CervicalCheck programme in itself.
It isn’t foolproof. It never has been. We women knew that. But only up to a point.
I have had my regular tests over the years and I’d have to say, when that letter drops through the letter-box, that letter that every woman opens with trepidation, I have always breathed a sigh of relief when it has told me that no abnormalities were detected.
In other words, I believed the result. I didn’t consider the possibility that a problem hadn’t been detected.
Yes, I knew it wasn’t absolutely foolproof, but I thought that the chance of abnormalities being missed was fairly small. I didn’t realise the true margin of error.
So perhaps that was also an element in the impetus behind the cover-up.
Yes, CervicalCheck is a valuable screening service and every woman, as Mrs Phelan has categorically said, should continue to go for smear tests. But it is certainly not perfect and we should be aware of that too.
So, whether or not the secretcircle people were trying to protect the screening service, they still behaved in a totally unacceptable manner.
More than that, they behaved in an arrogant manner. They knew best. They were the ‘experts’.
They would decide what information to drip feed, when, and to whom. And God forbid that the women at the heart of it all, the women who were entitled to know, would ever hear a word of it from health officialdom. Nothing to do with them.
AND now it’s to do with all of us. The Pandora’s box has been well and truly prised open. And if the horror that has been unleashed shows us anything, it’s that the whole health service culture has to change.
Health Minister Simon Harris has said he intends to appoint at least one patient advocate to the new nine-member HSE board.
I would say that the words ‘at least’ in his statement are the most important.
One patient representative on a nine-person panel is not enough. We all know how that works. The ranks close, the ‘professionals’ call the shots, and the ‘outsider’ is sidelined and silenced. Just look at the banks. How much good did the public interest representative do on any of those boards? None is the answer.
In the end they were forced to act in the interests of the banks, not the people.
What we need now are people with patients’ interests to the fore, people who are demonstrably committed to asking the hard questions, who believe first and foremost in absolute transparency. People who won’t be fobbed off. People with the mindset and demeanour of the likes of Mary Lou McDonald and Alan Kelly. Terriers with a bone.
This is a real opportunity for farreaching change. For secret circles to be kicked into touch and for honesty and transparency to be the new norm for our health system.
We need to grasp this opportunity. And we need to capitalise on it for the good of everyone.
If we don’t then it’s only a matter of time before another woman finds herself sitting in a committee room in Leinster House, sharing her dreadful story, and wondering how on earth, through no fault of her own, she ended up in this place of desolation from which there is no return.