It would be untrue to say that the delays experienced by those seeking treatment for Scoliosis in Ireland are simply a matter of money and resources. All the money in the world cannot train people capable of carrying out scoliosis operations any faster than they could be trained on the standard budget for such training. Nor could such a budget install the requisite equipment faster than the building works allow. The same principle applies to housing: If solving Ireland’s housing crisis was simply a matter of money, then such a thing could be done tomorrow.
That said, it is equally untrue to suggest that money, resources, and priorities have nothing to do with it either. In the Oireachtas last week, answering his very first leaders questions, Taoiseach Simon Harris suggested that the Covid 19 pandemic and the shuttering of various health services as part of the lockdown had a negative impact on Scoliosis patients. That is correct. It was also a choice made by his own Government.
I write this because over the weekend a controversy erupted in relation to this tweet from Gillian Sherratt, the mother of eight-year-old Harvey who has been waiting for Scoliois surgery for seven of the eight years of his life. Gillian Sherratt was most upset, she says, to see her son’s case being compared to the resources provided by the Irish state to immigrants:
🚨important-read this post in full🚨
This is not a post I would ever share normally but we feel the need to address this. We have seen a large number of posts featuring Harvey and Harvey’s story being used in this horrific and racist light. As Harvey’s parents we do not agree… https://t.co/OojmlAYbFh
— Gillian Sherratt (@GillSherratt23) April 21, 2024
There are a couple of things to say here.
First: The Sherratts, perfectly reasonably and understandably, have chosen to make their son’s condition and the delay to his treatment a matter of public interest and public debate in order to secure public support and apply political pressure to the Government to have their son’s condition addressed. They have made his case a political issue. That is not a negative thing, in fact it is a testament to their love for their son that they’ve been willing to be so public about his condition and their struggle to get care for him. The only negative part of their story is that the health services, and by extensive the government, put them into a situation where they had to make the case public.
But the nature of political issues is that they are about choices: No Government, of any stripe, can do everything. The reason that we have Governments in the first place is to decide where definitionally limited resources will be allocated. This is politics by definition: More public spending, or tax cuts? A new road, or a new hospital?
Spending on supports for immigrants or spending on scoliosis surgery is a legitimate question of resource allocation. The Sherratt’s might not like every suggestion for finding the resources to help their son, but that does not mean that such debate is improper or inherently illegitimate.
Second: “comparison” politics is a staple of Irish public debate, and one much loved, in fact, by the political left. There are few public complaints made when somebody absurdly (and this happens often) suggests that a hard case could be solved by abolishing the Government jet, or slashing political salaries and pensions. Politics in Ireland has always been inherently a list of complaints that somebody somewhere is profiting from the misery of others.
In almost every case, that is nonsense. It may well be nonsense in this case too – but it is nothing out of the ordinary.
Third: Gillian says in her tweet that “immigrants our hospitals would be in an even worse staffing position and some of our favourite staff over the years have been non Irish,” and she is correct that immigrant workers are a major part of the Irish health service. But we cannot simply take the positive impact of immigration upon the health service without also accepting that in some areas the impact has not been so positive. It is patently clear that immigration is also, in fact, impacting service provision in the health sector. Consider this report, from yesterday, by Fatima: We have GPs in Ireland now openly saying that immigration is having an impact on the services that they can provide to the originally resident population in areas right across the country.
Fourth, even if the case of Harvey Sherratt and other children in his position is not purely a matter of resources, it is certainly a case of Government priorities, time management, and focus. The Minister for Children, one might think, might have an objective and material interest in focusing on the rights of Irish children who are suffering without the treatments that they desperately need. But the Minister for Children is Roderic O’Gorman who, we are told and can besides observe for ourselves, is swamped instead in dealing with the migration issue.
There is clearly an argument to be made that so much Government bandwidth is taken up in dealing with that issue that other issues are sliding through the cracks of the administration. Indeed, this is effectively the argument that the Taoiseach himself made just last week, except about Covid rather than migration: Our eye was obviously somewhat off the ball with that crisis, he effectively argued. If that’s an argument that can be made about the lockdowns, then it can certainly be made about immigration.
Finally, while we might give the Sherratts a break for being unwilling participants in the political sphere, we should not fall into the trap of deferring unconditionally to victims and hanging on their every word: The Sherratts have every right, as well as an obligation to their son, to raise the political issue of his treatment. They are to be applauded for doing so. But that does not make their particular views on immigration and “the far right” any more or less salient than those of the person behind the twitter account that they are offended by in this case. They are entitled to raise the case of their son; he is entitled to discuss it and argue in favour of propositions that he thinks might solve it. Putting them on a pedestal and dismissing him is inherently unfair.
As to the question of who is right, the answer is likely neither: If someone tells you that Scoliosis could be solved in the morning, or even next month, by simply fixing immigration, then they are probably so invested in the immigration debate that they would say that about any issue. It is clearly not true.
At the same time, somebody who tells you that immigration isn’t impacting other areas of public policy, and that it’s racist to suggest as much, is being deeply naïve. The truth clearly lies between those two extremes.
And while the Sherratts have my full sympathies, and I deeply hope that their son receives the care he needs, their laudable campaigning on behalf of their son shouldn’t – and won’t, at least here – shield them from fair criticism of their positions.
Update – Ed: Gillian Sherratt has responded to some of the issues raised in this piece in a post on X (formerly twitter). I’m including that response here for balance:
Thanks for at least not being offensive John, considering I was called a c*nt, a treacherous wh*re, and many others yesterday, this article wasn’t as bad as I feared..but just to add my own piece.
I am not naive, and well aware that the more people using the health service, the…
— Gillian Sherratt (@GillSherratt23) April 23, 2024