The Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín TD has said that the decision by the government to bring the Motion of No Confidence forward by a week is a cheap cynical trick to ensure that voters are not thinking about the government’s abysmal record on children with scoliosis. It is understood that the last and only time that a government brought a No Confidence Motion forward by a week was in 1976. It is also unprecedented that that a government counter motion of confidence would be undertaken without the original motion of no confidence being published or tabled.
Speaking today Deputy Tóibín said: “Yesterday the Scoliosis Advocacy Network and families of the children affected by the crisis gathered in the Leinster House to present to TDs and Senators. Mothers told of the deaths of their children, about children living in continuous and extreme pain, about lungs being crushed and stomachs being crushed. They spoke of their children who were left disabled by the lack of treatment. Images were shown of rods breaking through the skin of children waiting for treatment. The parents of Harvey Sharratt, a nine-year-old boy who died during the summer, having waited for years for an operation, also spoke in Leinster House. It is outrageous that the parents of children who have died, have to pour out their grief into the public domain over and over again, in order to shock politicians to do their job.
“The group also told of the toxic management culture in CHI, the bullying of staff, the bullying of parents, the spending of taxpayers’ money without oversight, the insertion of unauthorized springs into children, the hundreds of children undergoing operations that they didn’t need and hundreds of children still on waiting lists”.
CHI has been allowed to descend into dysfunction and crisis for over a decade. Twelve reports have been written into CHI, many unpublished and many castigating the continuous disaster within CHI. In 2017 Simon Harris promised that no child would wait over four months for an operation. This was not an exceptional promise. It was a promise to implement what is an international norm. Simon Harris failed in that promise and every single Minister for Health since has also failed.
I was asked this morning by a constituent why the government is bringing the Motion of No Confidence forward. I told her the truth. It’s because of the presidential election. The government don’t want the backdrop of the election to be a discussion of their record on the scoliosis crisis. They don’t want candidates being asked do they have confidence in the government.
We in Aontú get a small number of Private Member Business slots in the Dáil every year, it has been six months since we last had this opportunity. We will use these slots to pull every lever possible to ensure that there is accountability and that there is change. There is no accountability without a cost for wrongdoing. Real accountability can be the catalyst for change. We will use our Private Members Time next week to achieve justice for Harvey, accountability, and lasting change. We will not let the government’s cheap cynical trick this week change that”.
