The Government will face a Dáil vote of confidence in Tánaiste Simon Harris this afternoon, pre-empting a planned no-confidence motion from Aontú next week.
The move follows Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín’s announcement that his party intended to table a motion of no confidence in Harris over what he called “failures” in tackling long waiting times for children’s scoliosis surgeries.
Speaking on Tuesday, Tóibín accused the Government of bringing the motion forward “as a cheap cynical trick to ensure that voters are not thinking about the government’s abysmal record on children with scoliosis.”
“It is outrageous that the parents of children who have died have to pour out their grief into the public domain over and over again, in order to shock politicians to do their job,” he said.
“The government don’t want the backdrop of the election to be a discussion of their record on the scoliosis crisis. They don’t want candidates being asked do they have confidence in the government’s,” he added.
Tóibín claimed the Government’s decision to move the confidence motion up by a week was linked to the ongoing presidential election campaign. He also said the move was “unprecedented,” noting that “the last and only time that a government brought a No Confidence Motion forward was in 1976.”
He told reporters that the issue of children’s scoliosis treatment had been raised by parents and advocacy groups at a meeting in Leinster House earlier this week, where families described “children living in continuous and extreme pain” and alleged mismanagement within Children’s Health Ireland (CHI).
“The group also told of the toxic management culture in CHI, the bullying of staff, the bullying of parents, the spending of taxpayers’ money without oversight,” Tóibín said.
“CHI has been allowed to descend into dysfunction and crisis for over a decade… Simon Harris failed in that promise and every single Minister for Health since has also failed.”
Harris, who previously served as Minister for Health, has faced criticism over a 2017 failed commitment that no child would wait more than four months for scoliosis surgery.
RTÉ reported that both he and Fine Gael Health Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill met recently with the parents of nine-year-old Harvey Morrison Sherratt, who died in July after long delays in accessing spinal surgery.
Despite the controversy, the Government is expected to comfortably win the confidence vote later today.
The debate is expected to see opposition parties sharply criticise the Government’s record on children’s health services, particularly the operation of CHI and the ongoing surgical backlog affecting young patients with scoliosis.
The vote comes with little time left until the Presidential election, placing renewed focus on Fine Gael candidate Heather Humphreys and the Government’s handling of healthcare issues.