A CLARE Senator has called for the establishment of a statutory enquiry “to bring closure to the family of Aoife Johnston and establish the true facts of the night” that led to her tragic death in University Hospital Limerick.
Health activists have described the report published by retired Chief Justice Frank Clarke into Aoife’s death in December 2022 as harrowing but Senator Dooley maintained it failed abysmally to establish the clear facts around what happened on the night of the Shannon teenager’s death.
Senator Dooley said that Mr Justice Clarke’s report, the initial Dr Vida Hamilton report and the inquest into the death of Aoife Johnston had all failed to provide the answers the family deserve around the factual circumstances that contributed to her death.
Clarity is glaringly lacking, the Mountshannon native said and he pointed to the investment of thousands of hours to try ascertain the truth to only result in a “blame game”.
He said, “What’s not in dispute here is that something really wrong happened on that night in UHL. And it’s not exclusive to that night as mismanagement has pervaded this hospital for far too long. But on that night, it crystalised in the worst possible way. A teenage girl lost her life, her parents, James and Carol, have been left without a daughter and Meagan and Kate have been left without a sister.
“What is in dispute, however, is what caused this and the Johnston family and the people of the Mid-West deserve answers. In this country, justice must prevail, we must get answers when things go wrong, particularly terribly wrong like it did here. We typically get that but right now people are pointing fingers at each other and the noise goes on but the Johnston family’s entitlement to truth and justice is ignored. This noise instead needs to be filled with clarity and closure for her family. In filling it, we send a clear message, set a new standard for that hospital that bad practise won’t be tolerated and that, in turn, will lead to a better, safer hospital going forward.
“If we get to there, it will be an additional legacy for Aoife. At least then we can say that while her death should have been avoided, what came out of it made this hospital a better place for everyone else across the region,” he said.
Senator Dooley said he had some understanding about why Mr Justice Clarke’s hands were tied in terms of getting to the bottom of what happened but that does not recuse the HSE from getting the answers needed. “Mr Justic Clarke, it seems, was instructed clearly not to apportion blame and it is, indeed, welcome that he came up with recommendations in the report. But all we have to do is look at the response from the Johnston family to this. They are, to use their own word, bewildered.
“So, what we now need is to get this matter dealt with under a statutory inquiry where the truth can be traversed, where everyone involved in this can be brought into a proper, thorough forum that discovers what happened on the night that Aoife died. We will get to the bottom of what decisions or instructions were taken that should not have been taken, what action wsa sought by frontline staff that was not implemented and what, indeed, was the culture in the hospital, and who was responsible for it, that allowed all of this to happen. We need to know how significant was the management failure in this and ultimately what caused a teenage girl to die. Bernard Gloster, the Chief Executive of the HSE, has said ‘we failed Aoife’. It’s time to end the failure and put this right, with a statutory enquiry”.
