Emma: ‘The time for talk is gone. It’s time for action’
Brave women have done the country service by speaking out, writes Nicola Anderson
Emma Mhic Mhathúna has called for “real action and consequence” in the wake of the CervicalCheck scandal. Terminally ill Emma is one of 209 women who’ve fallen victim to the scandal. But the mother of five, who said she suffers from crippling pain, does not want to die without influencing major political, healthcare and legal change.
IN A busy family household and with the summer holidays fast approaching, a young mother is quietly trying to go about the business of preparing her children for her imminent death.
How do you prepare to die, knowing that your loss is cruelly immeasurable – because you are a 37-year-old mother of five very young children to whom you are the world?
How do you come to terms with dying, knowing that the cause of your death was readily preventable and that this nightmare should not be happening?
As the nation listened with angry, pierced hearts to Emma Mhic Mhathúna’s interview on RTÉ’s ‘Morning Ireland’, we mourned with her this incalculable loss because every woman, young or old, is Emma and she is every woman. This could have happened to anyone – but far more pertinently, this should not be happening to anyone.
Emma Mhic Mhathúna and Vicky Phelan. The HSE would rather we did not know their names. In fact it desperately tried to prevent their names from getting out there into the public arena.
Far better that they should be nameless, faceless statistics contained in an end-of-year report, penned in bland civil service language, in a mildly regretful chapter about areas where the HSE could do better. Or, even more anonymously – represented in a comparatively tiny sum in the outgoing column of the HSE’s vast balance sheet. Nobody could possibly have found them there.
The HSE hates that we know that Vicky is being driven on by the desire to see radical changes in the system and in the way that it treats women. Or that we know that her daughter, Amelia, met singer Ed Sheeran. Or that she used to be a running fanatic but that the pain now makes it impossible.
They would much, much rather we did not know that Emma did not collect the results of her cancer tests on the first day they became available because it was the confirmation day of one of her children and she did not want to ruin it. Or that she recently had a nightmare about dying before getting a chance to tell her daughter. Or that telling her children about her prognosis was the hardest thing she’s ever had to do because as a mother, it is her job “to protect them and to keep the bad news away from them”.
The HSE is allergic to personal stories because such detail is powerful and immensely dangerous to the status quo. And so it tries to control, block, gag and silence those who have fallen victim to its ineptitude. Because only in the dark, windowless and soundproofed corridors of secrecy can its power stay potent.
How do we know that this was its policy? Because on the same day that the nation wept to hear Emma Mhic Mhathúna say that she had to collect her children early from school to break the news to them that she is dying, the HSE was unfortunate enough to have three explosive memos to its chief, Tony O’Brien, put before the Dáil Public Accounts Committee.
“Coincidentally a patient diagnosed with cervical cancer and currently in treatment has requested a meeting with CervicalCheck which has been scheduled for next week (March 3),” it read.
“This type of consultation is one that occurs regularly in every hospital. It is likely to
have arisen even in the absence of a clinical audit process.”
Pointing out that patients always have the right to seek legal advice, it ended with the advice that the next steps should be: “Pause all letters; await advice of solicitors; decide on the order and volume of dispatch to mitigate any potential risks; continue to prepare reactive communications response for a media headline that ‘screening did not diagnose my cancer’.”
In one fell swoop, the callous cruelty of HSE policy was laid bare, contrasting in breath-taking fashion with the devastating truth and pain of Emma’s testimony.
These brave, powerful, extraordinary and yet ordinary women would not be silenced.
They told us their stories, they shared their excruciating personal pain and that of their families – and now we know.
Both Vicky and Emma are very clear about what they want – they want change so that no woman, no family, is ever again put through what they are now going through.
Once again, the organs of the State are finding out the hard way that silence only leads to an uglier picture once the truth is out. Once again, they are finding out that silence is never the answer.