State’s €12bn theft shows CervicalCheck row was no one-off
FOR up to 30 years, money was systematically stolen from the savings of thousands of elderly people and their relatives all across this country. This misappropriation of ordinary families’ often-modest means was done, according to a 2010 investigation, in ‘disregard of the law’. But it was a deliberate strategy, and it went on for decades because these illgotten gains were ‘an important source of funding’ for the thieves.
And when the victims of this shameless scam discovered that they had been fleeced, and went to the law to try to retrieve their money, a new strategy was required.
The victims were told to get lost, that they didn’t have a leg to stand on. Most of the families, the perpetrators reckoned, wouldn’t have the resources to fund a top-notch legal team, and the poor suckers would be scared off by robust and combative defence tactics – their savings would be gone, their farms or family homes might have to be sold, if they lost.
Strategy
Except the perpetrators knew that their victims couldn’t lose, and that’s where strategy number three kicked in.
For those who weren’t frightened off, or who didn’t conveniently die off, the instruction to the lawyers was to pay them off, settle their cases at all costs.
Because if any one of those families got inside the door of a court, they were bound to win, and then the game was up. Once one family is successful in court, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.
If the news of an award were to hit the media, thousands of other victims would come forward with their claims – and they were legitimate claims, for money wrongly taken from the pockets of vulnerable people, there was no question about that.
So here, in a nutshell was the plan: step one, take the money illegally. Step two, fight the victims’ efforts to get it back. Step three, buy off those victims who wouldn’t back down in case the rest got wind of their rights, and, for God’s sake, keep a firm lid on the whole sordid business.
Par for the course, you might think, for any morally dubious outfit, except the main player here wasn’t a rogue actor; it was the Government of Ireland. It was successive Ministers for Health and Justice going back to 1976. It is a State-sponsored fraud of massive proportions, involving up to €12billion in entitlements withheld from needy people.
And it is a scandal that proves the CervicalCheck cover-up, exposed by Vicky Phelan’s courage, was not an Irish government’s first rodeo – the strategy of denial, misinformation and secret payoffs was tried and tested long before then.
This State has form when it comes to putting its own interests above those of its citizens.
The story was broken by our sister paper, The Irish Mail on Sunday, based on documents provided by Department of Health whistleblower Shane Corr. He was, he said, ‘shocked by the scale of the cover-up... vulnerable people in the care of the State were wrongly stripped of their assets and in some cases their families disinherited’.
The money they’d saved for their funerals, the price of a final family holiday, even the cash that could have provided them with humble treats in their old age was callously misappropriated by the Government, from the 1970s onwards, ‘so that political promises could be funded elsewhere’.
The Health Act of 1970 entitled all citizens to free long-stay care in public institutions. But the Department of Health continued to levy charges on nursing home patients, because it needed the money. It was told time and again that the charges were illegal, but it kept on charging people, often leaving families in penury to keep them in care.
Finally, in 2005, the Supreme Court found that people who had paid unlawful charges were entitled to refunds. But when the scale of the department’s legal liability – up to €12billion – emerged, then-Health Minister James Reilly circulated a secret memo. It acknowledged that the State couldn’t win these cases so they were to be approached with ‘extreme care, discretion and confidentiality… if details of the cases… were to gain a high public profile, it would spark a large number of claims’.
Once again, legitimate claims, from families hit with illegal charges, which often left them in severe financial difficulties. Successive Health Ministers knew about, and followed, this advice.
Belligerent
So instead of looking after the welfare of its citizens, caring for the needs of the elderly and preserving the dignity and quality of life of their hard-pressed relatives, this State took their money on false pretences, and then employed the most belligerent and cunning legal strategies to prevent them recovering it. And as recently as 2017, then-Health Minister Simon Harris and current Justice Minister Helen McEntee received a confidential update on the scheme reassuring them that ‘the current approach is working well’.
That’s the approach, let’s be clear, of bullying, delaying and denying, of secrecy and obfuscation, and of using every means in the State’s power to hold onto money stolen from ordinary families over 30 years, money desperately needed by old people in their final years – pocketed by the same State that was supposed to be protecting them.