Years of limbo thanks to the HSE’s inaction

DURING the week, we heard the story of Matthias Kausch, a German national who has lived in Wexford for 16 years and who received notification from the HSE of a neurology appointment on New Year’s Day – in 2024. It’s an astonishing indictment of how the HSE operates, but one that can easily be corrected.

More difficult, it seems, is giving a reasonable response to the plight of another German national, Julia Thurmann. Ms Thurmann fell victim in 2007 to acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, which left her paralysed from the waist down. After 11 months in hospital, she was transferred to a nursing home on what was supposed to be a temporary basis. Last year, this newspaper and RTÉ’s Prime Time highlighted the fact that she still was in the nursing home a decade later. Today, we reveal that despite petitions to ministers for health, TDs and senators, she still is there.

All she wants is a place to call her own, and to live independently.

If housing her were to place grave financial strain on the system, the delay might be understandable, but in fact it would be significantly cheaper for the State.

Instead, everyone seems equally determined to avoid ownership of a problem, to pass the buck, and to find excuses to do nothing. What that means, sadly, is that the Julia Thurmanns of this world, people whose conditions are being exacerbated by the inaction of those supposed to be looking after their welfare, remain in limbo, suffering not for weeks or months, but for years.