IF SIMON HARRIS WANTS TO CHAMPION THE CHILDREN, HE SHOULD FORGET HIS HEROICS AND JUST DO HIS JOB, BUT THERE IS PRECIOUS LITTLE SIGN OF THIS
Before the price of the National Children’s Hospital spirals into the stratosphere, the political paymasters need to call a halt.
Otherwise the big, dark hole being dug beside St James’s Hospital will swallow all available capital health funding for a generation. However, there is no indication that this Government is brave enough to take this step, or anything like it — such a course of action would be regarded by them as unthinkable.
I am reminded of Lord Denning. In 1980, during the campaign to free the Birmingham Six, Lord Denning, a leading British judge and Master of the Rolls, threw out a civil action taken against the West Midlands Police by the six men convicted of the Birmingham bombings. The learned judge declared that to accept their case, that police officers had lied about their confessions and beaten them, would have opened up “an appalling vista’’ for the British justice system. The reputation of the system was far more important than acting with justice.
Simon Harris, along with his predecessor and now Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, are trenchant in their defence of the National Children’s Hospital project. They seem to regard any suggestion that the whole thing should be reconsidered as opening up ‘an appalling vista’. It is time they put doing the right thing ahead of protecting their reputations. Meanwhile, they are using the ‘potential’ danger of a hard Brexit as cover.
There is nothing ‘potential’ about the dangers posed by the National Children’s Hospital project; it is a real financial quagmire happening in real time and swallowing massive resources. If our political masters don’t halt the current fiasco, go back to the drawing board and cut the losses for the taxpayer, then — Brexit or no Brexit — the main opposition party should make them pay the political price of their obduracy.