There are a handful of events that have the capacity to reduce one to almost incoherent outrage. One of these occurred in early October, although we only heard about it this week. It is the hounding and bullying by the Mater hospital of former cancer patient Janette Byrne, writes Mary Raftery.
Janette is one of those rare individuals who is prepared to stand up and be counted, even when literally flat on her back on a hospital bed (or even a trolley). She has been one of the leading voices for patients suffering the callous indignities of a chaotic health service over the past four years.
Through Patients Together, the campaigning group she founded, and in her recent book, If It Were Only Cancer, she has displayed a thoroughly laudable determination to fight for the rights of all current and future patients within the system.
The Mater hospital has taken grave exception to her book. However, rather than the more usual course of perhaps issuing a public statement expressing disagreement with Janette's views, the hospital has instead chosen a different and considerably more threatening option. It instructed its solicitors to write to the book's publishers, Veritas. They stated that Janette had defamed the hospital, that she had attacked staff without giving them a right to reply and that her book contained factual misstatements and exaggerations.
What is remarkable about this is that Janette was at some pains in her book to commend the commitment, care and general good humour of many of the staff members she came across, singling out a number of doctors and nurses for special praise. What she describes in sometimes gruesome detail and with searing honesty is how it feels to be weak, sick and helpless within a system that is profoundly dysfunctional. It is clear that the Mater's response is an example of that dysfunction - if anything, Janette's book and campaign should be welcomed by an institution dedicated to the care of sick people.
Instead, the hospital seeks to silence Janette. It has provided not a shred of evidence that anything in her book is inaccurate. Its defensiveness and bullying tactics are deeply disturbing in an organisation that has been chosen to have a leading role in the new national children's hospital, now to be located on the Mater complex.
In this context, it is worth looking at who exactly controls the Mater hospital and who is likely to have taken the decision to try and silence Janette Byrne. (Their PR company, Slattery Communications, refused to tell me which boards or bodies within the Mater had discussed the issue of her book.) The ownership of the Mater's parent company resides with the Sisters of Mercy, who make up a majority of the shareholders, or more accurately the company members. For the record (and because they are not named anywhere on the Mater's website), they are: Sr Helena O'Donoghue (one of the negotiators of the infamous Church/State deal on redress for institutional child abuse), Sr Helen Keegan, Sr Cait O'Dwyer, Sr Esther Murphy, Sr Geraldine Collins and Sr Fionnula Glynn.
The members of the hospital's board of governors do appear on the website (www.mater.ie). They comprise Cardinal Desmond Connell and a number of academics, medics, businessmen and a judge. There is also one priest, Fr Kevin Doran (described as an ethicist), and two Sisters of Mercy.
The chair of the board is businessman Desmond Lamont. Last September, he sparked a major row with the Health Service Executive by stating the hope that the 150th anniversary of the Mater would be marked by the opening of the new national children's hospital on the complex. Describing Mr Lamont's remarks as "disingenuous, presumptuous and unhelpful in the extreme", head of the HSE Brendan Drumm said the decision as to when it would open would not be taken by the Mater.
Prof Drumm also indicated that the new children's facility would be independently governed. However, it has not been explained exactly how this independence will be achieved.
Given what we now know about the Mater's attitude to patients such as Janette Byrne who fearlessly speak out about the inadequacies of the service provided, it is a matter of urgency for the HSE to clarify the precise nature of the future connections between the new children's hospital and the Mater.
This is all the more important in the light of what we discovered last year about the Mater's attitude to cancer research. The hospital's clinical trials advisory group decided the use of certain experimental drugs carrying a warning against pregnancy for those taking them was contrary to its Catholic ethos, as it might encourage the use of artificial contraception. In the face of a public furore, the hospital board was forced to reverse the decision.
It should be remembered that despite its entirely private ownership, the Mater hospital receives public funding of over €200 million a year. It consequently should be accountable to us, the taxpayers, for all its actions and policies, including the disgraceful attempts to silence Janette Byrne.