Will a taoiseach not yet born apologise for HSE one day?

THE cruel and bitter irony could not be more extreme. At one end of the country, the Taoiseach Simon Harris was in the Dáil apologising on behalf of the State to the victims and families of the Stardust tragedy for being forced to wait 43 years for justice and for being made to endure what he described as a living nightmare. It was moving, sincere and unequivocal and, like all genuine confessions, it was good for the soul.

At the other end of the country, in Kilmallock, Co. Limerick, the inquest into the appalling and completely avoidable death of 16-year-old Aoife Johnston while in the care of the chronically under-resourced Emergency Department at University Hospital Limerick was proceeding. The inquest heard heart-rending admissions of chaos, failure and neglect at the Limerick hospital, all of them utterly shocking.

Sorry for one injustice – yet still allowed the other to happen.

To borrow the Taoiseach’s words about Stardust, what’s happening in Limerick is a ‘living nightmare’ – another egregious example of State injustice, in real time.

SIMON Harris, aged only 37, wasn’t even born when the Stardust disaster happened, or when Judge Ronan Keane reported months later that arson was the likely cause, a suggestion that hung like a criminal charge over the victims’ heads until it was set aside as wrong in 2008 – 27 years later. The Taoiseach certainly can’t be blamed for all that.

Nevertheless, having been elected a TD in 2011, Mr Harris has been a full member of the Cabinet since 2016, cutting his teeth as a junior minister in Finance for two years before that. As he was a member of government for those eight years, we’re all entitled to know what precisely he did to advance the cause of the Stardust campaigners.

The 2019 decision by then attorney general Séamus Woulfe to direct new Stardust inquests provided Mr Harris and the entire State apparatus with the means of redemption, a pathway to justice, even if that justice was denied and delayed by the dark, amoral forces at the heart of the State for 43 years. Woulfe’s decision was utterly just, despite outraging key elites who had opposed such a move for decades – another story that cannot be told at this stage for want of a proper freedom of expression in this country, combined with the chilling effect of a draconian Defamation Act.

In respect of Limerick, however, it must be remembered that for almost 50 months – from May 6, 2016, to June 27, 2020 – Simon

Harris was Minister for Health with overall political responsibility for national healthcare, including responsibility for the woefully hazardous service provided at University Hospital Limerick. And all through his time in Health, Mr Harris was aware of particular problems in Limerick, problems that since then have only gone from bad to worse, to lethal.

Also aware of the ongoing catastrophe at Limerick’s emergency department were over 11,000 people who marched in January this year in protest the state of the service. Sadly it was by then much too late for Aoife Johnston, whose death was this week adjudged a medical misadventure (whatever that actually means). She died in the Limerick emergency department tumult in December 2022, despite the fact that simple, readily available antibiotics could have saved her young life.

Aoife died in front of her parents, having slipped through the cracks (according to one nurse) in a store room of an emergency department that was ‘akin to a war zone’ and ‘chaotic’ (according to doctors) due to a combination of overcrowding and not enough medical personnel, the result of Government mismanagement and/or neglect. She died after waiting for 12 hours to be seen by a doctor and despite arriving at the emergency department with a GP’s letter that stressed the need for urgent care due to suspected sepsis.

Three years earlier, in December 2019, Martin Abbott collapsed and died at the same emergency department and lay undiscovered on the floor beside his trolley for about an hour. When he was eventually found, ventilation was impossible as rigor mortis had already set in. Mr Harris had been Minister for Health for three-anda-half years by that stage.

AT MR Abbott’s inquest earlier this year, which also returned a verdict of medical misadventure, his daughter Ann-Marie Abbott said: ‘I just do not know how many more people have to die before the system changes.’ This week was one in which stubborn resilience finally achieved a magnificent victory. Such persistence in the interests of justice by relatives of the Stardust victims fairly reflects the character of those killed on that fateful Valentine’s night in 1981, and underscores the kind of contributions they would have made to society, individually and collectively, if they hadn’t been unlawfully killed.

It’s not a dampener on this week’s apology to step back and wonder if another State apology will be delivered sometime in the future, by a taoiseach not yet born, for the horrible neglect and abuse in Limerick, for the suffering and the deaths that are occurring there in front of our eyes.

The question is: does Simon Harris’s great apology mean a change for the better in the way the State and its guiding elites treat citizens? You need only look at what’s happening in Limerick to figure that one out.