In 2019, Sinn Fein tabled a Motion of No Confidence in the then Minister for Health, Simon Harris.
Ahead of the Dáil debate and with cringe inducing bravado, Harris took to Twitter to challenge his political opponents. “Bring it on” he tweeted.
Well, bring it on they did, and it wasn’t all empty guff and political opportunism either.
Even Fine Gael’s erstwhile Confidence and Supply partners/not partners in Fianna Fáil used the occasion to put the boot in – repeatedly.
But it was Sinn Fein’s spokesperson on Health at the time, Louise O’Reilly, who very helpfully provided ten reasons why Minister Harris had to go.
Top of the list was the gross overspending plaguing the National Children’s Hospital. Here is what she had to say on Minister Harris’ oversight of that calamity:
“How can anyone defend knowing of a catastrophic overrun on a capital project and doing nothing about it, saying nothing about it, and actively keeping it from colleagues? How can anyone defend the withholding of and the drip-feeding of information to Deputies and Dáil committees? How can anyone defend reappointing a board which was presiding over the meltdown of the children’s hospital project without seeking any advice on the performance of that board? How can anyone defend an expected cost overrun on the national children’s hospital of €450 million?”
But for O’Reilly, those who were defending Minister Harris were also, by extension, defending the continuation of an entire litany of health-related nightmares that were all taking place right under the Minister’s nose:
“How can anyone defend a 27-week wait for the results of cervical smear tests? ” she asked before going on:
“How can anyone defend record-breaking waiting lists totalling 1 million patients?
How can anyone defend forcing nurses and midwives onto the streets to strike for safe staffing?
How can anyone defend the Minister’s role in the CervicalCheck scandal?
How can anyone defend the recruitment and retention crisis across the front line of the health service?
How can anyone defend thousands of children waiting years for speech and language therapy or for occupational therapy?
How can anyone defend hundreds of older people waiting months for home support services?
How can anyone defend the crisis created in general practice?
How can anyone defend the spending of €2 billion on agency staff in eight years?”
Many of these points were then echoed by the Fianna Fáil spokesperson and now Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly. Indeed, Deputy Donnelly made it explicitly clear that all of those things were happening because the Government had “lost control of healthcare” on Minister Harris’s watch:
“In the past four years the Government’s spending on healthcare has increased by more than €4 billion. It is one of the highest figures in Europe, yet somehow people in Ireland wait longer to see doctors and receive treatment than anywhere else in Europe. We have the second lowest number of hospital beds per capita and the lowest level of consultants in Europe. Mental health services are in crisis and general practice has been hollowed out. Some children with special needs are waiting three and a half years for an intervention. Children with scoliosis cannot undergo assessments for a wheelchair, while 10,000 children are waiting for more than 18 months for a hospital appointment,” he said.
In a normal half-functioning political system any one of these issues should be enough to bring a government down. Yet even cumulatively they were still not enough for Fianna Fáil or Deputy Donnelly to vote no confidence in the then Minister overseeing the Department at the centre of them all.
Donnelly’s view was that to vote no confidence was to precipitate a general election, and who wanted that when the economic spectre of Brexit was hovering in the political background (Fianna Fáil would instead abstain on the vote.)
Even if this was not as weighty a reason as Donnelly thought, it was not an unreasonable point to make at the time.
What has proven to be utterly farcical however are the additional reasons he gave for not voting no confidence:
“Reasonable people might ask why Fianna Fáil would abstain in the vote. It is because if it were to do otherwise, it would trigger a general election. That means that there would be no Parliament for three to four months, no parliamentary oversight of CervicalCheck in having the backlog eliminated and losing any chance of getting down the cost of the children’s hospital. While we all vie for votes, BAM [the contractor], rightly, would continue to build and the window of opportunity will be lost.”
So, for Deputy Donnelly, keeping Minister in power and the government in situ was necessary so that some kind of handle could be gotten on the run-away costs of the Children’s Hospital.
How did that work out exactly? After all, the government stayed in power but the pace of claims by the contractor seems to have escalated rather than abated since 2019.
In terms of the CervicalCheck scandal, it has taken until this week for the Dáil to debate the CervicalCheck Tribunal (Amendment) Bill 2021.
This clearly shows that nothing would have been lost in terms of parliamentary oversight of this issue if the Dáil had voted to oust Harris at the time. The issues would have been progressed regardless.
In his defence, the first thing Minister Harris pointed to in his ‘Bring it on’ tweet and his Dáil contribution was the work he had been involved in on the repeal of the Eighth Amendment. Two years later and with at least 13,000 babies aborted, that appears as even less of a winning defence of one’s legacy than it appeared at the time.
Of course, many of the problems that plagued Minister Harris’s stewardship of the Department of Health still persist to this day.
Which only proves I suppose that whatever the answer is to our health system’s woes, it is not Stephen Donnelly, but neither is it Simon Harris.
In that respect it is time to stop mythologising his Ministry and to start remembering it for what it was.