Why Donnelly’s failures have nothing to do with property
THERE are lots of reasons for showing Stephen Donnelly the door and trying out someone else as minister for health, but his failure to register his rental property as the law commands is not one of them. His offence is hardly the crime of the century now, is it? People need to calm down, take a breather, and realise that Mr Donnelly is guilty of nothing more than a technical breach – an ‘oversight’ as he says himself – and he won’t be forced to walk the plank like Robert Troy. There’s nothing to see here, which is why journalists and political opponents need to chill.
It’s perfectly clear that Mr Donnelly had no intention of hiding from public scrutiny the few bob he’s collecting as an accidental landlord arising from his purchase of a property which, as in the case of tens of thousands of other people the length and breadth of Ireland, sank into negative equity and would have cost him a fortune if he had offloaded it earlier. The man is more to be pitied than condemned regarding this particular investment.
However, his political record as health minister has been almost entirely disappointing. Mr Donnelly is out of his depth, unable to fight his own corner, and hasn’t a baldy notion what he’s at when it comes to what the late Seamus Brennan described as playing ‘senior hurling’.
ONLY this week, three other issues underlined again Mr Donnelly’s manifest incompetence as protector of the nation’s health. On Tuesday, medical consultants said it would take 15 years to clear the current hospital waiting lists unless there is a dramatic increase in funding. There are now well over 900,000 people on such lists, across all specialities, and these include 100,000 children.
The problem is worsening by the day, as queues continue to lengthen commensurate with consultant vacancies. There are now almost 900 vacancies and over 100 of these are occupied by unqualified doctors. In matters of life and limb, some of the people making decisions haven’t even got their full ticket to practise the relevant speciality.
All this is presided over by a minister who doesn’t exactly fill the room with political personality.
Mr Donnelly’s timidity as health minister was further exposed by the revelation, also this week, that children enduring unspeakable physical suffering and mental anguish from scoliosis had their operations deferred at Temple Street because staff there were unable to cope with an increased workload – despite an extra €19m in funding announced by Mr Donnelly for such operations as late as February last. In fact things are going from bad to worse. Clare Cahill of the Scoliosis Advocacy Network said the waiting list last September was 187, but this August it had risen to 258.
The third nail in Mr Donnelly’s political coffin comes by way of A Guide To Talking About Cervical Screening published by CervicalCheck for media and academics. Considering the history of the CervicalCheck disaster, in which over 200 women developed cancer after their original smear tests were misread and more than threequarters of those were not informed that the initial results were incorrect, you’d have expected that any such guide would be particularly alert to the need not to reoffend surviving victims, their families, and the families of women who have already died.
Nevertheless, the guide states that women’s lives were not ‘put at risk by doctors not informing patients of the results of the audit’ and that such non-disclosure ‘did not impact the treatment or care of the people concerned’.
NOT surprisingly, this latest example of the State twisting and turning and trying to cast itself in a less damaging light drew criticism from the cervical cancer advocacy group, 221+, which accused those responsible of giving an incomplete and selective description of what happened.
In this botched attempt to rewrite history, the guide glosses over glaring negligence on the part of CervicalCheck to respect the rights of patients and their families by informing them of failures as soon as they became known – and, startlingly, ignores entirely the impact that such betrayal may have had on the psychological health, resilience and confidence of women battling cancer.
The warning by Sinn Féin’s Eoin Ó Broin that Mr Donnelly might be forced out like Robert Troy if there are more skeletons in his closet was ridiculous, considering that one of his own party colleagues admitted a similar oversight.
Wasting political oxygen on this empty issue is an insult to the public. Stephen Donnelly has far more serious political questions to answer about his management of the health portfolio.
His performance there is condemnation enough.