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RECENT SCANDALS LIKE the Grace case show that as a society we’re still abdicating our responsibility to take care of our most vulnerable children, according to Brendan O’Connor.
The journalist and RTÉ host has written regularly in recent years about his daughter Mary, who has Down Syndrome, and his family’s struggles to get her the help she requires.
It’s just under a year since he appeared on the Late Late show to speak about the challenges being faced by parents of children with disabilities.
On that occasion, he said that in future people would look back on the way children with disabilities were treated in Ireland and say that we lived in an “inhumane” country.
“I would in no way set myself up as being in any way an advocate or, you know … an expert on this,” O’Connor said, as he sat down for an interview with TheJournal.ie.
“One thing that does happen when you have a child with a disability is that you meet other people who have children with disabilities – and you maybe understand a bit more what’s going on with them.
It’s the one thing that you get from all those people – they are desperate, they are terribly desperate.
They’ll nab you wherever they can with their stories – and they all have awful stories about them just trying to get some help and trying to get anyone to listen to them.
As he tends to, whenever he speaks about this subject publicly, he stressed that he and his family were lucky in that they were able to pay for services.
He repeated several times that he shouldn’t be regarded as an expert.
Nevertheless, the years of experience dealing with state agencies, psychologists and medical forms mean he’s well-placed to speak about the challenges being faced by parents fighting for help for a child with a disability.
There are thousands of people in the country who are “really desperate,” O’Connor said.
“They’re so caught up in the day-to-day firefighting of their situations a lot of them that they’re not the kind of people who have time to march on the Dáil or give out or whatever. Most of them are just getting on with it, you know?
I think it would be fair to say that a lot of those people feel really abandoned and they feel that they’re people who have paid their taxes all their lives.
They work very hard and everything - and then I think there’s a feeling that their time came when they needed the State and that the State, in a lot of cases, isn’t there for them.
Said O’Connor:
“In a lot of cases the State has farmed this out to these agencies. We know more and more that a lot of these agencies aren’t possibly doing this job as efficiently and effectively as they might do.”
The ordeal faced by parents struggling to get an early diagnosis for their children so they can get the help they need is indicative of deep-rooted problems within the health system, O’Connor argues.
The first step is that the people can’t access these services.
That starts very early on when people are waiting a year or two to get a diagnosis for something called early intervention. The point being that if you can get in there early with a kid you can help them learn to speak and learn to walk and learn to do things.
If his family weren’t able to access services themselves, his daughter would have been entitled to very little, he said.
“I look at my daughter. She’s a great kid – she’s very bright and all of that. But, you know, she has Down Syndrome. She’s always going to need help. But basically they look at her, they do this test. So she comes out mild, right?
So, maybe, yeah, she’s at the mild end of the spectrum. But compared to you or me she’s not mild, like – she has a disability.
She’s six now – she’s entitled to no services whatsoever and I think that’s a bit of a … to me that’s not right.
That ‘mild’ diagnosis is something all parents in such circumstances worry about, as they head into an assessment.
There’s a situation where people are told ‘oh, keep your kid up all night the night before, so that they might fall down the stairs when they’re coming in or they won’t be able to do anything and they refuse to cooperate’ … that doesn’t strike me as a situation that works.
In terms of what we’ve learnt from recent headlines…
“I guess you would tend to think that we’re still farming this situation out. We’re still shoving things away under the carpet. We’re still pushing people into these institutions and there’s a certain amount of oversight now but we still see, you know, very unfortunate stories of what goes on in these institutions.
It’s layering upset and upset and stress and difficulty onto people who won’t admit it to you – but they have a lot of stress and difficulty in their lives already just due to these accidents of birth or whatever, and we just seem to try and make it much much harder for these people.
Brendan O’Connor’s Cutting Edge returns next Wednesday, 22 March on RTÉ One at 9.35pm. We’ll have more from our interview tomorrow.
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How about looking at the reason HSE IT secutity controls are so poor
@Random_paddy: apparently this hack started with someone clicking something they shouldn’t have. So the issue there is training.
To protect themselves completely, the HSE needs to lock down their systems so that eg none of their computers have WiFi or USB, and Internet is only available on some computers which have no connection to the rest of their systems. They also would need to either ban remote working, or secure the home networks of their remote employees. But that still won’t protect them against inside jobs or some inherent vulnerabilities of all computer systems.
@Random_paddy: IT security is as good as anywhere. Not much you can do when a staff member hands control of his machine to those intent on causing harm/making money. From what the HSE said regarding this staff member and their ‘broken’ PC, its fairly obvious the HSE were not deliberately targeted, the scammers just got extremely lucky and met the right tool. Staff member ‘inadvertently’ downloaded ransomware and attempted to rectify the issue themselves rather than contacting their IT Dept. In their attempt to save themselves the embarrassment of having to explain what they were doing to download ransomware, they literally cost the taxpayers of this country millions and exposed their most personal records to the dark net. The scammers must have near wet themselves with excitement when they realised what network that PC was linked to.
@Tommy Roche: Maybe a single compromised machine shouldn’t compromise the entire system!
@Tommy Roche: A logical explanation. Had to switch off listening to Ms Shorthall pontificating. Good that Niall Collins pointed out that when she was in the hot seat she jumped ship.
@Thomas Smyth: It was the employee who compromised the machine whilst they were connected to the HSE network. I realise many are hoping the blame will go up the ladder within the HSE, but in this case the blame will fall entirely where it should. There are of course innocent ways a machine could become infected with ransomware, but all of them involve downloading a file(.exe, jpg, MP3, etc) over the internet from an untrusted source. That’s a huge no-no for an employee with login privileges to the organizations internal network. If you want to download pics of the latest erotic adventures of Sharon the Sheep, at least do it in the privacy of your own home, on your own internet connection.
@Tommy Roche: People seem to have a notion here that the “Employee” simply clicked a link and the whole system was compromised, I would not believe that notion for one second.. Firstly one can assume that if the employee was general staff then not a hope they had access to the complete network because if so the whole HSE IT team should be sent packing… This for me at least stinks of the HSE IT team not have a bulls notion and regardless of an employee doing what they did, at least have a DR backup for crying out loud…
@Random_paddy: all the regulars here last week complaining about the people replying to the phishing mail that the company sent about pay rise….now you see how important it is that they should just not clicked on those links. Fffs
@Dave: He initially clicked something, or downloaded something that resulted in ransomware being installed on his machine. The machine froze, a screen popped up warning the machine was infected and showed a number to call for ‘technical support’ The employee actually phoned and spoke to the scammers. They asked him to allow remote access so that they could diagnose and fix the problem, which he did. If this had been a normal home PC the scammers would have rooted around for a bit, say they had found the problem and state a fee to fix it. The person would pay the fee and the scammers would delete the ransomware. In rooting around this machine they found they had stumbled into something huge that could pay off big time.
The password to the system was definitely ‘HSE’
@Eoin Fitzgerald: They inadvertently hooked into the feasibility study and schematics for the Children’s Hospital and thought, ‘By the Beard of Tsar Nicholas, ve cannot disrupt zis system any more than it already is …. Give zem ze incription key, and be done wiz it ..’
Maybe people who know very little about Information and Communication Technologies should stop speculating.
@Sean O’Doherty: that would help alot.
Or maybe it’s because a ransom was paid.
Maybe a contractor paid the ransom?
Then state can pay the contractor?
But the state luckily didn’t pay the ransom?
Something smell off with this, but they had a risk assessment done, every small business has that done, doesn’t mean the problem is dealt with.
@Divad Nayr: I would not believe a word of what is being said, an employee clicked a link, the whole system was compromised and then all of a sudden a decryption was received,,,, Ya right.
Training helps but some of these fake messages/sites can be incredibly realistic. I’d love to think that I would not be caught out but I probably would.
Hands up who thinks the ransom was paid!
Now to scroll down to the comment section and let us hear from the experts
@Sidney Cooper: including yourself.
Because obviously the threat their making is to leaking everyone’s data and not to disrupt the system
Its a trap…
Maybe it’s cause the whole idea was to get peoples data and then get paid for not releasing it and they have the data now ,so they give them key so they can get their systems back but they still have the data so they still have to pay for it not to be released or not pay and they put it out their
All happening whilst we have college’s cancelling coarses on cyber security, just because on its second year hadn’t large enough numbers.
There is understandably awful lot of debate around the circumstances of this hack, network security, alleged user training failures, including am alleged employee with computer issues clicking on a link offering help etc.
The reasons behind this entire fiasco comes down to an issue which will be familiar to many and will likely offend people that are working in IT, but here goes…
In many companies and organisations, when a user reports an issue to their IT department, which may be one person or an entire team, the response is pretty much universal…
We are flat out, we have logged your issue and will get back to you and or someone to have a look when we get a chance…hours or even days go by and nothing gets done…
To me it sounds very much like they paid the ransom. These cyber terrorists don’t give it out for free.
Maybe they just feel sorry for how absolutely pathetic their victim is – maybe one of their consciences cracked under the massive weight of outright pity
Don’t believed this was caused by someone just clicking on a mail. Far easier to blame an employee than blame the failures of their it system, just like in any plane crash the pilot always gets the blame and never the plane,
Really?
Borris the blade and the Sneaky f’n Russians !
Really.
have your say