Madam, – I find your story (“Micheál Martins daughter dies in London”, Home News, October 30th), which also appeared on the front page of almost every Irish newspaper that day, to be extremely offensive.
The little daughter of Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin has sadly died in the best children’s hospital in the world, where I used to work – Great Ormond Street in London.
So? This is a personal tragedy; not a news story.
Irish children are dying every day. Why is this child singled out for special mention? Is it because she is a child of one of Ireland’s elite? I work every week with the parents of children who cannot get the care they need in our corrupt HSE system. Children whose parents are not in the elite die earlier, because of a lack of resources. The service here for Cystic Fibrosis sufferers is unbelievably poor, despite the fact that Ireland has one of the highest incidences in the world and should be leading the way. Teenagers I know have ended their lives, because we have almost no mental health services to cope with their illness.
So, it’s ironic that his lovely little girl was treated in Crumlin Hospital, where many of my children cannot even get an appointment for over a year, and where so many of the services have been cut. The specialists cannot even reply in writing to me currently, because their secretarial services have been stopped! And guess what? This is all the legacy of Micheál Martin, minister of health from 2000 to 2004, when all the money, which I handed over in taxes, but never saw, was sloshing around the country.
That’s a news story! Put that on your front page. – Yours, etc,