The family of Harvey Morrison this week hit out at the Department of Health’s plan to hold a closed door inquiry into Children’s Health Ireland (CHI) services.
“It’s a slap in the face for parents of children with scoliosis and spina bifida,” Harvey’s parents Gillian Sherratt and Stephen Morrison, from Clondalkin in Dublin, said earlier this week.
You will likely remember these brave and devastated parents for their social media campaign calling for the resignation of Tánaiste and former Health Minister Simon Harris in 2025. That campaign came in the wake of the death of Harvey (9) on July 29th 2025.
Harvey, as those familiar with his plight will know, spent years suffering due to spina bifida and scoliosis, with his suffering exacerbated by delays in accessing what should have been urgent scoliosis surgery. His quality of life was reduced as a result, in the years before he underwent surgery the year prior to his death.
More than a year on from Harvey’s passing, his parents have accused the Minister for health of reneging on a promise to hold a public inquiry into the treatment of children like Harvey suffering from scoliosis.
On Monday, the report of a scoping exercise for an inquiry into CHI services for the two conditions, commissioned by the Department of Health, was released, sparking a fresh outpouring of criticism from parents and patient advocacy groups.
And guess what? They are more than entitled to be angry.
The recommendation has been made not to hold a public tribunal into spinal care at CHI – which seems worlds away from what distressed families have asked for from the process.
Any commission of investigation, we now know, will be held largely in private and is to lead to a final report being issued by Health Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill.
Ms Sherratt has said that this decision has left parents feeling as though “they are on the outside, behind closed doors,” adding in an interview with the Mail: “Disappointing feels not strong enough of a word. This is like a slap in the face to all these parents that have just found out their child and their child’s harm has been excluded from this investigation.”
She added that it had been agreed in a meeting with Jennifer Carroll MacNeil and Simon Harris last November that any inquiry would be child and family centred.
Indeed, looking at what is being proposed, it appears to be extremely narrow.
Not only would the proposed investigation primarily operate in private, but it is only set to focus on the timeframe from January 2019 to December 2025.
How can that be when it comes to a crisis that long predates 2019?
Simon Harris’s now infamous promise that no child would wait more than four months for surgery by the end of the year was made in 2017 – and while it generated a flurry of headlines, it was a moral promise that was never kept.
What is clear is that this closed door inquiry seeks to focus on administration and waiting list management – rather than what it should be focusing on – which is what happened to all of the individual children involved.
What were the often horrendous consequences of delaying their care? You take that solemn promise made by Simon Harris nine years ago, and think of how it was not kept.
A promise made and broken to some of the most vulnerable families in Ireland. These families lived with the mental torture of watching their child suffer, and they were given years of false hope. Their children lost years of their childhood as their conditions progressed and worsened.
And yet we now have a closed door inquiry lined up that may very well ignore what happened to so many individual children and families. This inquiry, as families have warned, is too narrow to establish what went wrong and why.
Not only did Mr Harris fail to keep his word then, but the Government is failing to keep its word now, years down the line, and after promising to deliver “transparency” and “accountability” more times than we can count.
In 2024, Harvey’s parents revealed that he had been taken off Children’s Health Ireland’s active waiting list for surgery – something they had only found out by emailing CHI themselves. As his parents watched their son struggling to breathe, and despite three surgeons telling them Harvey needed surgery to implant growth rods in his spine, he was off the list.
The couple said then that they felt “quite broken and defeated by it all.”
“In terms of where we go from here and how we move forward, it’s very hard to say, until we get the answers to all the questions I’ve had.”
“If I hadn’t emailed CHI, how long would we have gone without knowing that Harvey had been removed from that list.”
This prompted an SOS call to other parents, whose children on the urgent scoliosis list may also have been removed.
Surely, these parents and their experiences should be heard in public. There should be nowhere to hide. As the Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus Paediatric Advocacy Group said during the week, the proposition has “gaps in timeframe and clinical focus,” and may very well wind up becoming nothing more than “a farcical exercise in administrative sleight of hand.”
Ms Carroll MacNeill, responding to criticism, said this week that while some parents want a public tribunal, others “very definitely want it in private.” Then why are both Spina Bifida and Scoliosis patient groups so up in arms?
And let’s be honest, the Minister has not exactly inspired confidence. Last February, Gript questioned Carroll MacNeill on the viral 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 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.
Ms Carroll MacNeill’s snarky tone and passive-aggressive answer showed that she was agitated by what was a very reasonable question. What was worrying then was that to the many who viewed the exchange with Ben Scallan, it seemed to show a thinly veiled level of heartlessness. She completely ducked the direct question about the specific case of a child, and she evidently did not appreciate any follow-up questions.
It was pure deflection. And if the same complacent attitude is brought into the Government’s latest exercise, it will be just that – more deflection.