HSE has ‘gone rogue’, warns finance committee chair

THE crisis-hit HSE has become a ‘rogue’ organisation that must be reined in, according to a Government TD and chairman of the Dáil Finance Committee.

Fianna Fáil TD John McGuinness spoke out in the wake of a series of controversies involving the State health agency, from surging waiting lists to the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) scandal in Kerry.

Mr McGuinness, whose committee has a role in overseeing the HSE, told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘Increasingly it appears to be the case that the HSE are a law unto themselves. They have gone rogue. There is very little accountability to ministers or even the Taoiseach. There are too many generals and not enough soldiers.’

Mr McGuinness challenged Taoiseach Micheál Martin to intervene personally to show health authorities – and his own minister – that ‘there is a boss’.

The Carlow-Kilkenny TD said Health Minister Stephen Donnelly needs to show greater leadership over his department secretarygeneral, Robert Watt, and HSE chief executive Paul Reid.

Mr McGuinness told the MoS: ‘The Taoiseach has to take an interest in a situation where Robert Watt says the objective is to bring the waiting list back to pre-Covid levels when pre-Covid waiting lists were the worst in the history of the State.

‘There is a need for a boss; Stephen Donnelly needs to be the boss. Watt and Reid should be reporting to him. We don’t see that,’ he said.

He said of the HSE: ‘It is too big. It is inert, it is non-responsive to the daily challenges families face. It is an institution whose priority appears to be self-preservation.’

He said politicians are left to ‘deal with the human casualties of a system that doesn’t work’.

Using a local example, he added: ‘I am currently dealing with a former soldier who is blind, who depends on meals on wheels, walks up and down the road for 100 yards and who spends the rest of the day in bed to avoid the rats in his house.

‘When you go to HSE offices, by contrast, you sink into the carpets. What are they doing about this blind soldier who has rats running around his kitchen?’

Mr McGuinness also criticised his party leader’s ‘condescending attitude’ to issues such as buses that are being organised by independent TDs for cross-border eye cataract treatments for their constituents.

This follows a recent row in the Dáil when Mr Martin claimed Michael Healy-Rae had approached mass-goers at churches in Kerry about providing bus transport to the North for cataract surgery.

In an angry outburst, the Kerry

TD told the Taoiseach to ‘cop on a small bit’, adding: ‘God damn it, that’s an awful thing to say.’

But Mr McGuinness said the Government ‘should actually be embarrassed about it’.

He said: ‘This is yet another example of how the HSE has outsourced work it should be doing.’

Within Government, concern is rising that ‘a series of scandals’ involving the health services ‘are waiting to burst through’.

Cork North Central TD Pádraig O’Sullivan warned: ‘We have just touched the tip of the iceberg with CAMHS.’