The fightback of an utterly broken system

IRISH institutions are living organisms and they are designed to protect themselves. When a scandal emerges, State bodies rapidly try to fight it with every weapon at their disposal. The past 12 days have shown us yet again how this culture of secrecy works; how neglect of the citizen is the first response when it comes to protecting the institutions. In this case, it was CervicalCheck and the HSE, and the unfathomable decision not to tell women that an audit of smear tests revealed abnormalities that had previously been misread. Now, the Government is saying it does not wish to terminate the employment of HSE director general Tony O’Brien.

This is, of course, another example of self-preservation. With O’Brien still at the helm, there is a buffer zone around the health minister and the Government itself. O’Brien can be the focus of public scrutiny for the three months he has left in the job, three months in which other players will hope the news cycle moves on before the next crisis emerges.

And emerge it will, because we have no history of proactively identifying problems and, when they surface, a poor track record of coming clean straight away and dealing with the issue. We saw it in the Garda whistleblower cases and now, in the Disclosures Tribunal, the force can’t even produce 12 of the 15 mobile phones that belonged to two commissioners.