Yesterday, my colleague Ben Scallan questioned the Fine Gael Health Minister, Jennifer Carroll MacNeill on a story that had gone viral on social media over the weekend – the case of an Irish family forced to turn to crowd-funding once again in a desperate bid to cover the cost of surgery for their little girl.
As was pointed out to the Minister, the family of seven-year-old Roxanne Kelly – and many other families – are using what Ben later described as GoFundMe healthcare, despite the enormous healthcare budget the State has, which has been increased again to €27.4 Billion for 2026, a spend of €7.5 Million per day.
The Minister didn’t like the question, as evident from her snarky tone and her passive-aggressive answer which failed to address the issue Ben raised, even though he persisted with follow-up questions which Caroll MacNeill also evidently did not appreciate. You can watch the exchange below.
“It’s great that you’ve worked out how much is spent every day,” she sniped. Grow up Minister. The job of a political correspondent is to hold those in power to account. For far too long too many Irish journalists have been little more than nodding dogs regurgitating government press releases. The Minister and her colleagues should expect tough questions, especially when disastrous outcomes of the mismanagement of public funds is all-too evident in the healthcare system and elsewhere.
As scores of people who responded on social media yesterday noted, she failed to answer the fundamental question. All the waffle about wages and light and heat didn’t answer why funds could not be found to help a little girl who desperately needed scoliosis surgery, and who now has a 80 degree curve on the spine after being neglected for so long.
Senator Anne Marie Flanagan addressed the Minister when she tweeted: “You missed an opportunity when asked about children like Roxanne, to take the time to empathically respond addressing the barriers that she and others experience. Roxanne is the most precious, incredible seven-year-old and deserves the best quality of life and outcomes equal to her non-disabled twin and all children her age. Please help fund her trip to the US. Thank you.”
Politicians faced with tough questions don’t miss opportunities though: they are trained to waffle and to include lots of time-wasting guff about being glad to be asked the question when clearly the polar opposite is the case.
Carroll McNeill listed the many ways in which our taxes are being spent on healthcare in a tone of a benevolent patron who is miffed that the gratitude expected for such generosity is absent from the exchange. There’s far too much of this attitude in general in modern politics. It’s not your money Minister, it’s ours.
And on behalf of the endlessly squeezed middle, we’d like to think the taxes inexorably reducing our salaries each month are being spent to help children like Roxanne instead of being wasted on excessive outsourcing, and double payments, and storing obsolete supplies, and project overruns, or any of the other ridiculous expenditures for which the Minister is ultimately responsible.
The failure of every Health Minister in more than a decade to get to grips with this issue is frankly baffling. It’s almost 10 years since Simon Harris made his promise than no child with scoliosis would wait more than 4 months for the treatment they need. Yet progress seems to be almost non-existent.
The frustration of parents like Mairín Nolan, pressed into taking action and speaking out because of the intolerable suffering being endured by their children, has led to a great deal of public upset and anger. Does the Minister seriously think a snarky response to questioning is a good optic at this time? The backlash to the impatience her predecessor showed to ordinary voters before the last election should have been a lesson to politicians in every party.
The Minister said there is a dedicated programme for spinal surgeries abroad and that CHI wrote to around 80 children on the list to offer international surgery where that was appropriate. But that doesn’t answer the question as to why Mairín Nolan’s little girl must now get on a plane again to Florida and can only make that trip for essential surgery because of the kindness of the Irish people who have responded to a crowdfunding plea.
Roxanne’s parents are taxpayers too, of course, as are the elderly people clambering aboard busses to get their cataracts treated in Belfast for fear of going blind, and as are all those on waiting lists who may die because an illness that can kill them doesn’t stop spreading or metastasizing while the HSE sorts itself out.
The Minister snapped back at Ben Scallan’s observation that Ireland spends far more than the OECD average on healthcare – $7,813 per capita, significantly above the OECD average of $5,967. She said that the OECD rated Ireland for patient safety but avoided mentioning that they also say we still have too few hospital beds (2.9 hospital beds per 1 000 population, less than the OECD average of 4.2) and too few CT scanners, MRI units and PET scanners (38 per million population in Ireland against an OECD average of 51).
But even more importantly, what successive Ministers never want to talk about is the startling fact that the health budget has doubled in the last decade but, as my colleague John McGuirk has frequently observed, no serious person could argue that the provision of care is twice as good.
“We spend our money as intelligently as we possibly can,” Carroll MacNeill said. There are many who beg to differ, Minister. Expect the difficult and unwanted questions to continue.