Summer of Discontent

For all that the early days of June mark the start of the summer season and should be typified by light and frothy news, the past weeks have been chock-a-block with big stories. You can't blink for fear you'd miss one. And they're blockbusters, each and every one of them.

Nationally, three stories stand out.
Regrettably, two are in the remit of the Health Service Executive - the wretchedly poor service afforded to children in care, and the misdiagnoses of miscarriage in several maternity hospitals.
The details are familiar by now, and have been well explored elsewhere in the media. What remains, at this point, is a lingering unease that there could yet be more bad news to come.
So far, most commentary has focused on the HSE and its apparent dysfunction. But the emphasis has largely been on operational, and therefore fundamentally personal, aspects.
This is consistent with popular interaction in which people's stories are the most valuable coinage. In such an environment, victimhood is your starter for ten. It's all about how people are let down by professionals and processes alike.
Fair enough, you might say. But this avoids the thorny historical and structural questions that must be understood and resolved, if things are to get better. One appreciates that such improvement is not actually in the interests of the media, which feeds off foul-ups and disasters — but believe me, most people would prefer dull competence to disastrous failure in both medical and social care fields.
In trying to understand how such awful things happen, it's important to remember that the HSE is an amalgamation of the old Health Boards. While there may have been good intentions behind formation of the original Boards, they turned into parallel local authorities with Tammany Hall politics in their souls. The HSE inherited a buzzing sack of debris.
As for the structural issues, one notes the views expressed by none other than outgoing HSE chief Brendan Drumm in a recent interview in the Irish Examiner, in which he said it would be easier to run if it did not have to take responsibility for children in care.
Too right. That responsibility, and all others to do with children, should be given to someone else.
The other major national story concerns the twin reports into the banking crisis. In his report into the causes, Governor of the Central Bank Dr. Patrick Honohan blames Government policy, banks and regulators… and he didn't spare the rod when it came to decisions made by incumbent Governments over the Celtic Tiger years.
Those decisions weren't just to do with 'pro-cyclical' budgetary decisions. They also concerned the regulation of the financial system, a system in which professional and institutional ethics appear to have been optional.
On the international stage, the two biggest recent stories were the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Israeli attack on an aid flotilla in international waters.
There is a thread that links all of these stories and that is the belief, among key protagonists, that they are above regulation.
In the case of the Israelis, they believe that international law doesn't apply to their actions, only to the actions of everyone else. And for over 60 years they have got away with this — thanks, in large part, to their sponsorship by the United States. If anyone else attacked unarmed ships in international waters everyone, Israelis included, would call it piracy. But when they do it they cloak it as self-defence…
The oil industry isn't much different. We need the product, so they make their own rules and are frequently intimately involved in government. Indeed, in some parts of the world it's hard to distinguish between oil executives and Government apparatchiks…
And you might well say the same of the bankers who were so central to (though not solely culpable for) the present financial turmoil.
Likewise, many pillars of gynaecology felt themselves above the herd. Indeed some, like Dr. Michael Neary, even contrived to have patients and their families feel grateful to him… until the truth became known, that is.
Such individual failure is not the issue in the care-for-children sector in Ireland. There, the failure is systemic. Care workers contend with a legacy inherited from the old religious-run child 'welfare' services (in which, as we have heard repeatedly over the last decade and a half, operators also thought that the rules didn't apply).
When you're able to make your own rules and then flout even these, it sure works in your favour. But it's bad for everyone else.
So far, we've all focused on anger. That's the nature of the times. In an environment of flaccid regulation, the media becomes the only avenue for redress.
But since newspapers and radio shows thrive in a culture of victim narrative, all the focus is on complaint and blame. It's time to move on from this, to a point where we start to talk about change. This might mean more regulation and therefore higher taxes.
This won't do anything, of course, to control the Israelis or the oil industry beyond our shores. But if it meant the summer season could be hysteria-free, laid-back and typified by light and frothy news, mightn't everyone be willing to fork out?
Let's start talking…