Horrors similar to dark days of 1950s.

Byline: COMMENT BY PAT FLANAGAN

DEAD babies crammed into tin boxes as grieving parents are told to stop wingeing - it could be the dark days of Ireland in 1950s but it was Portlaoise hospital a few years ago.

There's a whiff of the industrial schools and the Magdalene Laundries of the damning report from the health service watchdog into this dysfunctional hospital.

But dysfunctionality doesn't explain the callousness and lack of empathy shown to parents who had just lost a child.

It's as if Irish institutions and the horrors within have been passed down the decades.

After each new health scandal the authorities keep saying "never again" until the next one unfolds.

After years of Government cuts the public have come to almost accept the HSE is incapable of looking after the public health.

But it is in fact an institution, which can not only make you sick, it can actually kill you.

When HIQA is "unable to definitively conclude that services at the hospital are safe" the scandal effectively continues.

The Authority says "sufficient action was not taken by the HSE at a national, regional or local level to address these issues" meaning warnings weren't heeded and babies died as a result.

Bad enough that they were incompetent, it is shocking that this report found staff failed to "show compassion in the care they provided".

Imagine medical staff giving parents the news their baby had died in a hospital corridor.

What kind of creature takes grieving mothers and fathers to see their dead child in a tin box and then reprimands them for crying. How is someone who stuffs a dead baby into a tin box that's too small to take the body and then bring it on a wheelchair to the parents allowed to work in a hospital? One heartbroken mother said she did not remove or hold her baby for fear of being unable to return him to the box.

But the fact is the callous individual who did this, and all the others responsible for this catalogue of horrors, are still in their jobs.

That old word again "austerity" makes it into this damning report as it discloses "austerity-focused" HSE chiefs didn't even bother to visit the hospital despite serious concerns.

There are people in management in this dysfunctional health service that don't have any specific role while others have titles and huge pay packets but do little or nothing.

They are there because they're there and should have been made redundant when the various regional health boards were absorbed into the Health Service Executive.

Instead of learning from this disastrous situation this Government have repeated it by creating another monster that goes by the name of Irish Water where it is openly admitted there are thousands of workers surplus to requirement.

In time the report will be buried, just like the little babies and the health service will move on to the next scandal and another investigation.

What is needed right away is a full public inquiry, or even a tribunal to out those behind these horrors.