Opinion

Patrick Murphy: The wheels are coming off but no one is accountable

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy is an Irish News columnist and former director of Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education.

Left to right: Therese Ward, Jean Garland and Danielle O'Neill talk to the press after the publication of the Independent Neurology Inquiry report. Picture: Hugh Russell
Left to right: Therese Ward, Jean Garland and Danielle O'Neill talk to the press after the publication of the Independent Neurology Inquiry report. Picture: Hugh Russell Left to right: Therese Ward, Jean Garland and Danielle O'Neill talk to the press after the publication of the Independent Neurology Inquiry report. Picture: Hugh Russell

In the next election here it would be lovely to have the opportunity to vote for people like Danielle O’Neill, Jean Garland and Therese Ward.

You may not be familiar with these names. They are three ladies who spoke eloquently and forcefully following last week’s publication of the Independent Neurology Inquiry Report.

The report found that patient safety was failed after one consultant’s 5,000 patients were recalled and one fifth were found to have “insecure” diagnosis. They had undergone procedures and treatment for conditions they did not have, suffering unnecessary harm as a result. The Belfast Trust failed to act on complaints from patients for several years.

The trust’s response was predictable: neither the organisation nor anyone in it would be held accountable. That’s when the humanity and honesty of the three former women patients shone through. They said that the trust, the health department and the General Medical Council should hang their heads in shame and resign.

They said they did not want to hear those hollow words, “Lessons have been learned”, demanding accountability, not just at a corporate level, but from individuals. If those three women were in government, this would be a better place to live.

Sadly, health minister Robin Swann (praised consistently by this column) was not standing beside them. His apology may have been well meaning, but since everyone (even Boris Johnson) apologises routinely these days, apologies are becoming a devalued currency. The only valid apology is accountability.

It is probably too much to claim that these three women’s stunning dismissal of stock phrases and lame excuses could have been Stormont’s Rosa Parks moment, comparable to when a black woman refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Alabama in 1955.

It was certainly an opportunity for the main political parties to end the segregation of our society between those with power (political and professional) and those without it. The parties spoke but said nothing.

Every MLA should have been standing beside the victims, but Stormont does not do accountability (remember RHI?) Instead, members of the same government pretend to hold each other to account.

That culture can now be seen to encompass our health service, where unnecessary human suffering was apparently no one’s fault. The hope, as always, was that this scandal would soon be buried by another one.

We did not have to wait long for the next one. An independent report, also last week, into the Education Authority (EA) concluded that it has inflicted too many 'own goals’, is too slow responding to needs, is more process than product-orientated and allows processes to “get in the way of a child centric service.”

Established in 2015 to replace Education and Library Boards, allegedly for reasons of efficiency, the EA has regularly overspent its budget and the report states that organisations and individuals who rely on it have no idea what it is for.

Unlike health trust boards, the EA board is not selected by public competition. Independent members are banned. Members are hand-picked in apparent secrecy, mainly by political parties and churches, to represent their interests (even though under EA guidelines, members must bring “an independent challenge” to the board).

The report was concerned about this political appointment process, including “whether it interferes with EA decision making.” (Another case of power before people.) Don’t expect a solution any time soon: there is no time limit to how long political party appointees can sit on the EA board.

All of which raises the question: is the EA’s overspending the result of what the report calls, “the limited levels of financial skills or experience on the [hand-picked] board”?

The lack of a functioning Stormont would be less of a problem if it had robust systems and structures to keep the administrative wheels of government turning during its regular absences. Last week’s independent reports indicate that in health and education the wheels have come off.

But the good news is that no one was responsible.