Health Bill will 'improve accountability of HSE to Minister'

EMERGENCY LEGISLATION to ensure the HSE hands over case files of all children who died in care to an independent review group will also ensure that the organisation keeps the Minister for Health informed of matters “in a timely and appropriate manner”, according to Minister of State for Children Barry Andrews.

He acknowledged that it should not be necessary to extract information from a State agency “under any circumstances”, but noted that legislation had previously been required to oblige the Garda Commissioner to provide information to the Minister for Justice.

The HSE has an obligation under the 2004 Health Act to keep the Minister informed, but the Health (Amendment) “attempts” to “create a much stronger obligation on the HSE to do this. The human condition being what it is – all of us are human – such measures are sometimes required.”

The Minister defended the Bill, which passed all stages in the House late last night, against stringent criticism by the Opposition.

Fine Gael spokesman on children Alan Shatter said it was “deeply flawed”.

The Dublin South TD said it was “quite ludicrous” that special emergency legislation “needs to be enacted to compel the HSE to simply keep the Minister informed of important developments in the health service and in the child care services”.

He also said it was “quite extraordinary” that Mary Harney, who put the legislation through that established the HSE, had been “intentionally blind to the defects in that legislation for five years”. He claimed she had “so little respect for the Dáil that she is not present for this Bill, which is not just about children. It is about the political and accountability disconnect between the Minister and a quango, the HSE, which was deliberately established to immunise government from responsibility for things that go wrong.”

Labour health spokeswoman Jan O’Sullivan also criticised the Bill, its structure and wording.

“This legislation deals with children and we are talking here about the deaths of children in care. We must ensure that the independent review group gets what it needs in a timely fashion and that the report is published in a timely fashion and is available to the public,” she said.

“We must ensure that in the future we can develop a system in which people can feel confident that the most vulnerable children in our society are genuinely in care when they are in the care of the State and that they are not subject to some of the scandalous things that have happened to some of the children that have been in the so-called care of the State.”

Mr Andrews said the legislation aimed to “improve the accountability of the HSE to the Minister and of the Minister to the Oireachtas.

“We must be clear that we are dealing with a large organisation that works with the most vulnerable people, those who are sick and those who have disabilities. It has a staff of more than 100,000.

“The criticism that goes with running such an organisation and trying to ensure accountability must be borne by anybody involved in it, but there must be a change in the terminology that is sometimes used if we want to be fair, honest and generous about the attempts that are being made to improve things.”