On A Single Day 2019

The past forty-eight hours in Irish politics have been, shall we say, Irish. A series of bullet points below should bring you all up to speed on various situations:

•  The Social Democrats have announced that they will table a motion of no-confidence in the Minister for Housing, Eoghan Murphy, next week.

• Yesterday Fianna Fáil confirmed that they will not support the motion, meaning that the Minister will survive the vote. This comes after a week of outrage from Fianna Fáil regarding the housing crisis. They are a little red faced now that they’ve been pushed to reveal that they will support the Minister for Housing by abstaining from the vote next week.

• Yesterday Health Minister Simon Harris cancelled a meeting with Sharon Butler Hughes just hours before it was to take place. This followed months of pressure to meet with Ms Butler Hughes regarding her taking of issue with statements made by the Minister in the aftermath of her exposure of the extent of the IT issues at Quest Diagnostics earlier this year.

• Yesterday farmers gathered with tractors in Dublin City centre in protest over the price of beef and the lack of any profit, in most cases, for small beef farmers. Kildare Street, Stephen’s Green and Merrion Square were all closed for a large period of time. The was a large Garda presence in the capital, with physical barricades erected at all entrances to Kildare Street and government buildings.

• The farmers refused to move until they had been granted a meeting with the Minister for Agriculture, Michael Creed, but they were ultimately dissatisfied by the deal reached with the Minister, which basically amounted to an agreement to meet again at a later stage.r

• Yesterday Vicky Phelan, cervical cancer campaigner, who is terminally ill as a result of the misreading of her previous smear tests, deleted her twitter account, which had a very large following, after a lot of vitriol was directed towards her, specifically in light of her criticisms of an article written by Newstalk presenter Dr Ciara Kelly, in last week’s Sunday Independent, and the subsequent tweeting of this article by a communications director with the HSE.

• Today it was revealed by the Dáil Public Accounts Committee that the total cost of printing equipment, in Leinster House, including folding machines and guillotines came to €1,369,605 including VAT.  Detail also emerged regarding why these costs had been accumulated – the printer purchased/commissioned by the Houses of Oireachtas could not fit through the door into the building, so an additional large sum of money had to be spent on altering the structure of the building so that they could successfully bring the printer into the building.

• Today Bank of Ireland customers complained that they could not access their accounts either digitally or through Automated Teller Machines. The ATMs would not issue cash or allow customers to access their accounts.

• Tomorrow, terminally-ill woman Ruth Morrissey, another of the 221 women who are terminally ill (or already dead) as a result of the misreading of their smear tests, will appear in the Supreme Court to hear the verdict of the appeal case which was launched by the State against a previous High Court judgement which had found in her favour.

Backlash Over Dr Ciara Kelly’s Sunday Independent Article

 

 

An article in last week’s Sunday Independent has provoked some negative reviews from Cervical Check campaigners in recent days. The article, from Newstalk presenter Dr Ciara Kelly, was titled ‘Who benefits if screening is sued to oblivion? Not women’. The headline struck some as potentially hazardous. It did read a little like a criticism of women like Vicky Phelan, Emma Mhic Mhathúna and Ruth Morrissey, for taking court cases regarding the misreading of their smear tests which resulted in a terminal diagnosis.

 

First to comment was campaigner Lorraine Walsh, who took issue with the fact that Paul Connors, a communications director for the HSE had tweeted the article. This tweeting constituted, according to Ms Walsh, HSE promotion of “one sided reporting on this horrific situation for us, the people affected by the ‘system doomed to fail'”. Ms Walsh disclosed that she had spent the previous day “meeting seventy women and bereaved”.

 

Ms Walsh, who is one of the 221 women who received incorrect smear test results, was previously sent a strongly worded letter from the Department of Health condemning her remarks regarding Dr Tony Holohan’ handling of the cervical check crisis. The letter warned her to retract her statement and cease from making such allegations in future or else the Department would issue a “very trong response”.

 

 

Fellow support group representative Mr Stephen Teap, who lost his wife Irene in 2017 to cervical cancer after two of her smear tests were not read properly, said that he believed that “priority needs to be given to the women and families”, Mr Teap added that “we’ll live with these failures forever”. In his statement he branded the HSE’s commentary on the situation as an “insensitive move”.

 

Vicky Phelan, the lady at the centre of the cervical check controversy took offence to Dr Kelly’s suggestion that “nobody will benefit from sueing except those is receipt of legal fees”.

“Tell that to MY children, and the children of Emma Mhic Mhathúna and Ruth Morrissey who have successfully sued and who will NOT see our children grow up. Our settlements will be used to ‘benefit’ our families when we are gone” said Ms Phelan in an extensive ‘fact check’ of Dr Kelly’s article.

A LONG thread in response to @paulconnors27 and @ciarakellydoc
There are many problems with the below tweet and the article written by Ciara Kelly in the @TheSundayIndo Here are my reflections:
ONE: the Director of Comms for the @HSELive should be witholding comment until…1/10 https://t.co/GJKTJGFV99

— Vicky Phelan (@PhelanVicky) November 26, 2019

At the time of this article’s publication, Dr Kelly has not offered public comment on the statements from the 221+ representatives.

 

12% differential between breast cancer survival rates in public vs private hospitals, report shows

 

On Tuesday last, November 12th, a written question was put to Health Minister, Simon Harris, as to whether or not his attention had been drawn to any differential in cancer survival rates in the public and private health systems. The question was posed by Aontú leader Deputy Peadar Tóibín TD.

 

 

The Minister’s reply took a very defensive tone, he cited a report, published this year by the National Cancer Registry of Ireland and then proceeded to point out flaws in this report. He fails to adequately, in his reply, answer the question of whether or not he was made aware of a differential in survival rates.

 

 

Within a week of the submission of the written question, the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar tweeted old statistics from the period 1999 to 2007 as “encouraging data” which he just “came across”. He received considerable backlash in the aftermath of this tweet with cancer treatment/ medical card advocate John Wall tweeting that the statistics were “woefully out of date”, adding that “in a recent ICBP publication (2014) Ireland recorded the greatest improvement in two cases, but in no cancer type did it have the highest five year survival rate”.

 

Mr Michael Rynne, a member of the Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia Ireland Advocates’ Network steering committee, tweeted that the Taoiseach’s tweeting of out of date data was “shameful”, and that the information was “from 1999 to 2007, way before the new novel treatments which Irish patients have little or no access to”.

 

 

The report cited by Minister Harris in his answer to Deputy Tóibín’s question is this year’s NCRI report which shows that if you are first diagnosed with breast cancer in a private hospital then you have a 93% chance of surviving the first five years. However, if you were first diagnosed with breast cancer in a designated cancer centre you have an 85% chance of surviving the first five years. The five year survival rate for those diagnosed in an “other public hospital” stand at 81%.

 

 

Earlier this year Professor John Crown revealed that “for the first time” he had identified a clear distinction between what drugs are available publicly and privately. He said, at the time, that he sees both public and private patients and now he finds himself in a situation where he was “giving them different news about what treatments are available to them”.

 

 

Facebook yet to provide answers to Anne Rabbitte TD regarding deletion of beef protest speech video

 

Deputy Anne Rabbitte has revealed that Facebook have yet to provide her with answers as to why her Facebook post (which featured a video excerpt from her presentation to the Oireachtas Business Committee meeting on 1st October) was deleted “overnight” on October 3rd after it had gained “significant traction” on her Facebook page.

 

 

The Fianna Fáil spokesperson for Children and Youth Affairs has been the subject of media coverage this past week after she revealed to The Irish Times the content of a threat she was subject to in the height of the beef protests. The Deputy received a phone call on the landline to her home in the early hours one morning requesting that she “back off the lines, we know where you are”. She subsequently evacuated herself and her children from her home and stayed with a relative for a few days.

 

Speaking exclusively to Luke Peter Silke, the Deputy said that when the video of her presentation, which was “gaining amazing traction” was deleted by Facebook, she felt that “it just showed me that they support spin, because the viewership had, oh Mother of God, reached the thousands! It is alarming. It is censorship. I never spoke about injunctions. The video showed an engaging, working politician and they thought that it didn’t suit the narrative, that I didn’t fit in”.

The video in question showed Deputy Rabbitte asking questions of the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission which were appearing before the Business Committee that day. At the time of this article’s publication Facebook have failed to provide “any concrete answer or conclusion” as to the video’s disappearance on October 3rd.