Health Minister Simon Harris’s sparkle is fast losing its shine
■ ‘How long until sparkle fades and reality bites Harris?’
That is the headline in the Irish Independent (August 4) with a backdrop of the triumphal group, including the Taoiseach and Minister Simon Harris, celebrating the post-referendum euphoria after the referendum defeat of the Eighth Amendment.
There has been an abundance of ‘sparkle stripper’ published daily in your paper and elsewhere, starting with the CervicalCheck scandal.
As usual at the outset, unfulfillable promises were thrown about including the latest on August 2, when that brave woman Vicki Phelan got a vow from An Taoiseach “that a probe into the cancer scandal would happen”.
One promise made – that nobody else would have to go to court – was dismissed by Leo Varadkar. A further heading states “the smear test scandal families will have to sue through the American courts”.
The biggest promise made by the health minister during the abortion debate was that the abolition of the Eighth was about women’s health. What a joke.
We have learned from a recent report that one-in-five women in Ireland is being mentally or physically abused, that amounts to a quarter of a million of women.
Between 2011 and 2016 the number of separations in Ireland increased to 220,000 – the 2016 number shows an increase by 29,000 among the over 50s.
I would believe the health of that cohort of women under the stress and strain hardly improved and yet nothing has been done to reduce the stress – they have to wait four years before they can apply for a divorce.
There are almost one million (depending on which survey is current) on HSE waiting lists and would suggest at least half are women all under stress.
The parents of the children awaiting scoliosis operations must be the subject of intense strain on mothers at home all day, helping them during their waiting.
Not a week goes by when we read of settlements of huge sums of money for negligence of one sort or another in a HSE institution.
‘Dirty hospitals, patents spending hours alone: state of mental care exposed’ runs another headline.
Finally, we see the Pope has been asked to apologise on behalf of the Catholic Church for abuse.
Given that a high proportion of the management of the HSE and other medical institutions are Catholic, maybe the Pope might also be asked to apologise on their behalf to the people of Ireland who have suffered from a “systems failure” which seems to be the cause of all problems in this State.
Hugh Duffy Cleggan, Co Galway I