Last Friday, just before the bank holiday, the HSE issued a report ‘on natural and unnatural deaths of children known to child protection services over the last 10 years’. The timing, of course, was quite deliberate. Attempt to bury the news just before the June bank holiday weekend and hope nobody really picks up on it.
Here are some of the stats:
Between 1st Jan 2000 – 30th April 2010 124 children who were known to social services died – 63 of natural causes and 61 of unnatural causes.
27 young adults who had been ‘in care’ previously but who were no longer ‘in care’ at the time of their death died during this 10 year period, 4 of natural causes and 23 of unnatural causes. That brings the total number of dead to 151, broken down to 67 of natural causes and 84 of unnatural causes.
Deaths from natural causes include health related illnesses such as for example brain tumour, leukemia, heart disease etc.
Unnatural causes is broken down as follows:
21 - Suicide
10 – Unlawful Killing
14 - Drug Related
15 – Road Traffic Accidents
24 - Other Accidents
Quite what ‘other accidents’ entails is anbody’s guess. And these are just the children we know about, there are countless more who have ended up in lives that don’t bear thinking about. There are the children that have disappeared, 419 of them by some accounts, and the standard of ‘care’ that many of the children in this country receive is so low that it does more harm than good in many cases. Add to this state’s complicity in the abuse of children by the catholic church and it’s another stain.
How typical though that the HSE, instead of facing this head on, instead of acknowledging that things must improve, choose to try and sneak the report out so it garners as little attention as possible. Once again we come back to the Minister for Health who fails to take responsibility and who has fostered this culture during her reign. It doesn’t matter if its cancer misdiagnosis, bed closures, cancelled operations, or children who have been abused and murdered, the first thought is to ensure the PR damage is limited, not the damage to people.
For an organisation that is tasked with the healthcare of a nation that is an almost psycopathic attitude. It’s frightening to think that one day you might have to put your life in its hands. And this is not a slur on the people who work in the system, the doctors and nurses who battle against the administrative mess it has become, but the system itself.
It’s quite clear at this point that Harney will never resign. Those who dwell in her consituency have a responsibility to ensure that the change that is so desperately required comes about at the next election.
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Thanks to Elaine for the report – and as a new children’s rights referendum draws closer, all of us have a responsibility to ensure it’s not hijacked by right wing catholic loons like Coir, Youth Defence, the Iona Institute and cunts like David Quinn and Senator Ronan Mullen.
At a guess Harney won’t stand at the next election. Once the VHI is sold off she’ll be washing her hands saying, “My work here is done.”
Within a year, I imagine, she’ll be on the boards of several companies in the private healthcare business – insurers, private hospitals, nursing homes and other businesses that profit from the illness of vulnerable people.
You’re dead right Conan.
The King will reward his loyal subject with a barony of her own to rule and prosper from.
Twenty, the more I think of those stats the more I’d like to see them compared with percentages of children dying of similar causes in the general population – ie: expressed as a percentage, how many children in the same age group and not in contact with the childcare services die (i) of natural causes (in each category) and (ii) of unnatural causes (in each category)?
It seems to me that death, from all causes, is likely to be disproportionately high although it is an arm of the health services that was monitoring these children.
No idea how you’d go about getting those stats, Conan.
They’re even trying to get in there early now..
I suppose it cuts down on work later on..
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/hospital-wrongly-told-mum-baby-was-dead-in-womb-2211016.html
Now everyone knows why Harney insisted on retaining the Health portfolio after the 2007 election.
Her husband is a private health lobbyist and last week we found out that a group of private industry names were advising the DoH without charging consultancy fees.
One of the people named is a former Head of IBEC. Not hard to work out what’s going on here and it has ‘privatisation’ written all over it.
Of course Harney will clear off out of it when the damage is done- the only reason she’s there now is so that these people have a toe-hold into the health system.
She shouldn’t even be a Minister for Health given her rather obvious conflicts of interest.
Only the Irish political system could see a seriously obese smoker waddling around at health conferences discussing targets on smoming cessation and the obesity epidemic.
Lets face it- you’d have to have some neck to do that in the first place. The faces of newly elected committee members on international organisations much be an absolute picture when introduced to Ireland’s Minister for Health.
That might seem cruel and personal but it does make you wonder about the conversations around Ministerial positions in cabinet.
“I know- Mary would be perfect at Health!”
No she wouldn’t.
Twenty, do you know who or what organisation authorised their entry into the country?
Twenty, the Dept of Health should be providing that analysis. I’d be very surprised if they haven’t looked at it in-house and even if they haven’t, any self-respecting university social science department should be able to do so very quickly unless they’d be fearful of losing research grants. So, I expect it’ll be Alan Shatter who’ll come up with the figures.
The PD/IBEC privatisation agenda is all about stealing services from the poor to give ‘choice’ to the rich. Did I say Mr Harney is a former IBEC honcho, before his FAS apotheosis, and his later spousal Superbowl trip (among others)… at our expense.
Sniffle – no, I don’t.
Cap’n – have always questioned Harney’s role in that manner as well.
Conan – that’s if Shatter isn’t too busy defending Israel.
Interesting IBEC links from yourself and the Cap’n re: Mr Harney.
And Conan is right in that Harneys husband was appointed to FAS as well- long before their policy of behaving with public money as if it were the last days of the Roman Empire became known.
Between the obvious conflict of interest there and the vapour trails left by that group of unpaid ‘advisors’ who read like a list of likely IBEC appointees its not hard to detect the smell of privatisation-fish.
THE SOONER THE VATICAN ARRIVES INTO TOWN TO WHIP YOUR ASSES BACK INTO UNQUESTIONING SUBSERVIENCE THE BETTER…
Oh, wait..my caps lock went missing, so I commissioned a lenghty investigative tribunal to locate it. The results of this costly but nescessary process are to be published within the fiscal year or two. Anyone going for a walk down Kildare Street tonight? Bringing your kids?
I don’t think there’s any march this evening Mowl. No Dáil sitting.
But you can head down to the Israeli embassy and call them a shower of Nazi cunts instead.
From the Indo:
“THE leader of the Seanad came under fire yesterday for deciding not to open the Seanad for business — and then going to play golf in Turkey.”
This BS about the timing of releaed information is a bit grating. Its always the same from the RTE news etc.
Make a fucking note of it in your notebook and ring them on tuesday… If you’r that short memoried then maybe news reporting is not really for you…
So they shut down the Seanad and fuck off for a few rounds, surely followed by another few rounds and a belly-dance at the nineteenth, and all at Turkish expense. The Turks have their hearts set on EC membership.
Ever get the feeling your hole was being dry-buggered while your wallet was being bled dry, and your face was being laughed into?
The government press office always release bad news when they think people won’t notice. Any time there is a big international news story, you should immediately check out what the government are at here.
It’s a kick in the teeth that today is also the funeral of Daniel ‘Dano’ McAnaspie, it makes the links Twenty put up even harder to bear. The point made regarding the pall-bearers as ‘six young men dressed in identical white shirts and black ties carr(ying) Daniel’s coffin from a horse-drawn carriage into the church’ reminds us of the nature of their rent-a-suit background. And if, as Fadder McVerry stated, his god is a god of compassion, why the fuck doesn’t his god induce a massive stroke or heart attack on the Minister For Cakes and do us all a favour?
I was thinking that the only thing more ironic than Harney being Minister for Health was if she became Minister for Sport. Then I read the current Minister for Sport took part in the mini-marathon in Dublin yesterday. Harney should be convinced to take over the Minister for Sport portfolio then told that it is traditional for said minister to do the mini-marathon. I’d say she’d be dead by the 5km mark…
She would if she passed a high building with good line of sight.
But would the dodgy Irish roads actually take her massive weight? And would a mere bullet have the courage to enter all that blubber? Just close your eyes and throw a stone, sure you couldn’t miss her. The ugly fat useless cunt she is.
anyone see dispatches on channel 4 last night. a guy who had not worked in social services in
england in over six years went undercover into the child protection office in surrey,see if anything had changed since the baby p case it put shivers up my spine, because if the pressures that the workers were under are anything like the child protection services in the republic which im sure are prob worse then expect a baby p all of our own pretty soon
Let me preface my comment by stating clearly that any death of child is a tragedy, regardless of circumstances. But – am I the only one who is fucking disgusted by the whinging and crying of the various “aunties” and “uncles” who pop up on the media after one of these deaths occur ? I feeling like grabbing them and asking them why they – as the deceased’s family – did’nt put a bit more of a fucking effort into taking care of the child ? If you’re family enough to whine about the HSE on RTE1 after the event, you should be family enough to try and prevent it in the first place.
Like the lady on the front page of todays Indo? Goes to get her scan and they tell her her baby is dead in her womb. Goes to get a second opinion and is told her baby is fine. The hospital gave her the drugs to induce an abortion and arranged the removal of the foetus.
A seasoned scriptwriter from Hollywouldn’t horror movies couldn’t dream this shit up..
The Deathly silence from Cóir and Youth defence et al on this issue is fairly deafening
But then again t hey are much more concerned about the children in the wombs though..(and by children in the wombs,i mean of course imposing a facistic catholic agenda on women)
Im surprised that they didnt turn up to that womans house with placards
Last days of Saigon was a more caring society then today’s Ireland where, the commerce of political debate is the actual number of dead children killed by the state. The only honest broker here between the civil servants, government and media is Fergus Finlay cause his organization actually does something.
Everything else is just cuntish cant.
There’s always been a war on the poor in Ireland because they remind us that we were all poor once under British rule. And middle class Catholic Ireland doesn’t like to be reminded that they are the descendants of people who had nothing. There’s a shame attached to it.
The poor are punished for the failures of others.
I would like to see the comparable figures for child deaths in regular families though. You can’t debate it properly without that information.
There is a nasty element in Irish society which reminds me of the Glenn Hoddle view of Xtianity.
Hoddle and co believed that disabled people were being punished for sins in a previous life.
Its pretty obvious that the kids in institutions were viewed as pretty expendable by the church’s paedos and their cover-up pals in the civil service.
It smacks of them being ‘less than a citizen’ therefore worth less than some gobshyte whose parents could ensure Clongowes for their foetal deposit.
The mark of a civilised country is how it protects the vulnerable and looks after the elderly. What we are seeing now is the truth about Irish society.
And have things improved? Where is the much promised and much vaunted Rights of the Child document?
Longfingered.
Just an aside for the Shell to Sea Campaigners:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/picturesoftheday/7810381/Pictures-of-the-day-8-June-2010.html?image=4
Anyone think they might have a point?
Yikes
‘foetal deposit’?
Do you have any idea how the use of a term like that reflects back on you? Only an utter cunt could use such a disgusting phrase to describe any child, no matter what their parentage.
It’s enough to make me wish you were on the other side.
Think he was being ironic Git. Or else maybe you were being ironic.
To repeat, or Heaven forbid, to create a term of such repugnance would require a mind so evil, so foul, that the mere hint of it’s very existence would…
I can’t go on…
…I’m eatin’ me dinner.
While Harney’s considering how many sausages she’ll chomp along with her nosebag of bacon this morning, there’s this little dustmite to blow off..
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2010/0609/1224272125568.html