Banal blame game not helping scared women

EVEN the most robust chain of command can be reduced to a molten mess in the heat of a crisis. Unless leadership and authority are asserted from the beginning, answers become ever more scarce, as excuses roll off the mint. So after three weeks of searing revelations and heartbreak in the cervical cancer tragedy, John Connaghan, currently heading up the HSE, has apologised for a tragedy that has “affected every woman and family in the country”.

While attention might be focussed on taking care of the women trapped in this living hell, energies are for some reason still being expended on explaining how the Health Minister did not need to be told about what is emerging as the biggest health scandal in the history of the State.

Even as Mr Connaghan was expressing regret for the “confusion and alarm”, the secretary general at the Department of Health, Jim Breslin, was clear in his defence of the decision not to tell the minister that women were being informed that their smear tests had resulted in false negatives. Mr Breslin said a judgment was made that the problem “wasn’t of sufficient scale” and was being dealt with in an appropriate fashion that did not need to be “escalated”.

If the “problem” was big enough to frighten every woman in the country but not quite on a scale to merit the minister’s attention, the mind boggles as to the department’s priorities. These women do not have the luxury of wasting time on banal blame games. A broken dysfunctional system needs to be fixed.

So who is taking responsibility for making sure this does not happen again? What is the point of full disclosure or accountability protocols unless they go all the way to the top? The Taoiseach is in charge but there is still no sign that people’s fears have been addressed adequately.

In time we may get to a place whereby exploring what can be done will become more relevant than knowing what has been done, but we are still too far from such a point.