Since when was seeking out the truth a bad thing?

PRESIDENTIAL hopeful Liadh Ní Riada said this week: ‘I find it rather sinister that journalists are obsessed with my children’s private health records.’ Now, leaving aside the fact that ‘sinister’ is an interesting choice of word from a Sinn Féin candidate, I find it rather alarming that Ms Ní Riada is so careless with the truth, and so quick to resort to the Trumpian tactic of blaming the press when she finds herself in a tight corner.

If you didn’t know better, you might imagine that journalists were besieging her GP’s office and demanding to see the complete medical records of her children out of nothing more than indecent curiosity. If you did know better, you might imagine that a very cynical politician was painting an entirely disingenuous picture of her own victimhood in the belief that the electorate was dumb enough to buy it.

For the record, in this week when we’re highlighting just how #journalism matters, some facts: Two years ago, Ms Ní Riada made the issue of her daughters’ ‘private health records’ a matter of public knowledge. Nobody forced her, nobody raided her GP’s files, nobody even knew she had daughters until she decided to breach their privacy, on a very specific point, in the cause of her own political profile.

In a radio interview, she revealed that she had declined consent for her younger daughter to receive the HPV vaccine against cervical cancer (and also that her older girl had not received the booster shot).

The irony is that there was no need for her to bring her children’s health into the public arena. She could have expressed some constituents’ reservations about the vaccine, considered the arguments for and against, without intruding on her children’s privacy.

Now that she is the Sinn Féin candidate to replace Michael D Higgins in Áras an Uachtaráin, Ms Ní Riada finds herself being quizzed about her views on the vaccine. This is not idle inquisitiveness on the part of the media: cervical cancer, its merciless ravages and the shocking youth of its victims, has been one of the major matters of public interest in 2018.

Vicky Phelan and Emma Mhic Mhathúna are mothers in the prime of life yet they are dying from an illness that might well have been prevented by the vaccine that Ms Ní Riada publicly undermined in 2016. As it happens, 2016 marked an all-time low in the uptake of the HPV vaccine, due in part to public figures such as Ms Ní Riada questioning its safety.

It took an extensive HSE awareness campaign, backed by the WHO, to counter the misinformation that was denying young Irish girls this potentially life-saving jab. The cervical smear scandals of the last year have further boosted the vaccine’s uptake.

Ms Ní Riada now says she fully supports the HPV vaccine, but declines to say whether she supports it for her own children, or just other people’s. Does she support the vaccine for everybody… or just for everybody else?

It is, therefore, a matter of significant public interest, especially as she hopes to be President, to know whether Ms Ní Riada has put her ‘support’ into practice. If she were to declare that she had, indeed, been so reassured about the vaccine that she had now given consent for her daughter to have the jab then that would be of huge assistance to the HSE’s campaign.

INSTEAD, she declines to answer the question, hides behind the very privacy she herself breached, and accuses journalists of being ‘obsessed’ when they pursue her for the truth.

Well, she’s right on that score. Good journalism is ‘obsessed’ with holding politicians to account. This newspaper is ‘obsessed’ with knowing whether politicians’ public statements match their private deeds. It is ‘obsessed’ with the Constitutional right to a free press and rather concerned that a potential guardian of Bunreacht na hÉireann shows such willingness to attack that right for her own ends.

Most of all, it is ‘obsessed’ with the welfare of young Irish girls whose lives may be put at risk by scaremongering which denies them a vaccination for a preventable killer. (That’s why we campaigned so hard for the HPV vaccine in the first place). And just slightly ‘obsessed’ with making sure the job of President goes to a responsible person who is prepared to put the interests of the citizens above their own.