Brave mother Emma’s rage at State’s failure a lesson for us all
UNLESS you’ve been living under a rock or away on holiday, you’ll be familiar with the story of terminally ill Kerry mother-of-five Emma Mhic Mhathúna whose heartbreaking interview on Morning Ireland last week stunned the nation into outrage at how the Government run health service could fail Irish women so egregiously.
Ms Mhic Mhathúna who was one of the faces of the State’s effort to protect women from cervical cancer, her image a familiar feature of the HSE campaign to promote its vaccination programme. Clearly devastated and in shock, she could barely summon the words to describe how the news, that she was going to die from cervical cancer, was affecting her and her family.
After the Vicky Phelan scandal broke, Government Ministers and TDs thought the nation’s attention would turn away from health care disasters to the upcoming referendum, but Ms Mhic Mhathúna’s story has thrust the spotlight direcly back on them.
Ms Mhic Mhathúnawas forced to relinquish her degree in international development at Maynooth University in 2016, when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer after an abnormal smear test in 2013 wasn’t detected.
Listening back to the interview it is clear that like all Irish mothers, her primary concern is for her children. She speaks of breastfeeding them, making sacrifices, moving home, things many mothers do, the normal things.
To discover that she is going to die because she, like many other Irish women, were incorrectly told that their results were clear, has exposed an open wound in the CervicalCheck programme and in the HSE.
Her story first came to light in a local newspaper in Kerry.
In the interview on Morning Ireland you got the sense she was still realising the myriad ways in which the devastating news was affecting her.
She spoke of nightmares, of raw grief, of bitter disappointment. At times, I, as a journlaist, felt that feeling only ever experienced in the most heart rending of interviews, that you, your questions, your presence is invasive, intrusive somehow, but then there is no middle ground in truth.
Ms Mhic Mhathúna has accused the Taoiseach of ‘crying for himself ’ and not the ‘mothers, dying or dead’ or their children left behind.
‘I’m dying when I don’t need to die,’ Ms Mhic Mhathúna said. ‘My children are going to be without me and I am going to be without them,’ she said, once again putting her children first. She spoke of missing out on what their amazing future lives will bring, adding poignantly, heartbreakingly: ‘I don’t even know if my little baby is going to remember me.’
Through the prism of this woman broken on the wheel of a busted health system, the nation, at least those listening, cried out for something to be done. But what can be done in a culture where accountability is a byword for a golden handshake and a coffee at the golf clubhouse.
Speaking with eloquence and grace, just as Vicky Phelan did before having been awarded a basic sum to help her family when she dies, Ms Mhic Mhathúna said she has given up hope that Leo Varadkar and Health Minister Simon Harris wil do anything to answer the public emergency following the CervicalCheck scandal and it was now time for them to resign. A woman who always wanted to work with refugees, she has been cut adrift by the State.