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	Ombudsman and HSE Lost in Transmission The Post May 10, 2009 http://www.sbpost.ie/post/pages/p/story.aspx-qqqt=NEWS+FEATURES-qqqm=nav-qqqid=41623-qqqx=1.asp One of the few elements of clarity to emerge in the row between Children's Ombudsman Emily Logan and the Health Service Executive (HSE) was the lack of communication from both sides. Last week, Logan announced her decision to suspend her examination into how the health agency handled child protection audits of the Catholic Church. The HSE staunchly defended its actions without really knowing why it was in the firing line. In the end, neither side need have bothered, as neither was entirely in the wrong. The public spat came almost four months since Logan began the probe into the HSE, the Department of Health and the Office of the Minister for Children. By last week, the HSE was already two months late in meeting the third and final deadline which the Ombudsman had set for receiving relevant documents from the health agency. Logan began her statutory probe on January 9 last, after victims' groups and NGOs voiced concern following revelations that the HSE had permitted bishops nationwide to omit replies to information sought under a section of an audit which attempted to measure their compliance with child protection measures. The unanswered section related to detailed information about alleged abuse, as well as calculations such as the number of clerics accused of sex attacks in a diocese, among other material. Both the healthbody and the Church agreed to omit the information from the audit, based on the fear that, by collecting and storing data related to unproven allegations of abuse, they would be exposed to lawsuits over handling the so-called 'soft information'. On December 19, 2008, an independent body -the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church (NBSCCC) -reported critically on Bishop John Magee's handling of a series of complaints of sexual abuse in his Cork diocese of Cloyne. Magee had claimed that he simply misunderstood the nature of child protection guidelines, but met a hail of protest and criticism. Documents released along with the HSE audits last January showed that gardaí also failed to inform the NBSCCC. In the HSE's audit process, which was published in January, the Cloyne diocese received a positive review in terms of its compliance with the post-Ferns guidelines. The HSE's Primary, Community and Continuing Care (PCCC) section, under the management of assistant director Hugh Kane, which oversaw the audit, concluded that the Cork diocese had met its commitments to pass all relevant information to the authorities in future. But the Minister for Children, Barry Andrews, took what he admitted was a political decision to ask the Commission of Investigation into Dublin Archdiocese, headed by Judge Yvonne Murphy, to look into all allegations of abuse in Cloyne dating back to 1996. A central part of Logan's investigation will be to examine how Cloyne could have obtained a positive grade from the HSE audit while, at the same time, warranting harsh criticism from the NBSCCC and now being in the ambit of Murphy's commission. On January 13,Drummsent a standard reply, saying that the HSE would supply all the assistance required. But a fortnight passed before Logan's office heard from the HSE again, this time raising a number of legal questions about Logan's probe and the nature of the information sought. The correspondence started off a legalistic scrap between both offices, that continued until Logan's decision to suspend the probe last Wednesday. Logan extended the closing date for submission to January 30, again to February 6 and, finally, to February 23. A month later, on March 26, the HSE's solicitors sent a note to Logan's legal department, asking her office to instruct senior counsel to discuss the investigation with the HSE's senior counsel. She said that this was not a road she felt was warranted, and asked to meet to discuss the problems the HSE was having in providing all the information she sought. On April 22 -almost three weeks later -Logan wrote to Drumm, saying that she had yet to receive a reply. She asked that he let her know by April 29 -effectively two months after she had set the deadline - whether the HSE intended to cooperate with the investigation. The HSE wrote back, saying it would send the relevant files to her by the April 29 deadline, but Logan was unimpressed when she received a package which contained no more than a cover letter, along with the audit of Catholic Church dioceses that was published on January 7, 2009, a copy of which she already had and which had led her to initiate her probe. Last Wednesday, Logan suspended her investigation, citing "the lack of genuine cooperation from the HSE". Kane, however, was perplexed. He appeared on RTE Radio's Morning Ireland last Wednesday to mount a defence of the HSE's stance. Like his colleagues, he was somewhat stumped over Logan's decision -given that he had already sanctioned the release of the file that the Ombudsman wanted to review. With the exception of one privileged document, which related to legal advice on correspondence between the Church and the health body, the full file had been shared with Logan's office, he told RTE. As it turned out, following an emergency meeting at Logan's office last Friday, both camps realised that the HSE had, in fact, sanctioned the handing over of all the relevant files sought by Logan, but that the material never made it to her Dublin 1 office. A simple administrative error by the HSE's solicitor, BCM Hanby Wallace, led to an omission of a small part of the file, according to the HSE. Logan presumed that the omission of this material constituted a refusal to cooperate. She ruminated on her options and, one week later, announced in a press release on her website and on RTE Radio's Morning Ireland that she was temporarily shutting down her probe in reaction to the HSE's stance. After several hours of meetings last Friday, the administrative error at the Dublin 2 law firm emerged as the only outstanding difference between the sides. A HSE spokeswoman said that the legal firm had apologised to both the HSE and Logan for the mistake. A spokesman for the HSE told The Sunday Business Post that the agency was glad the issue had been resolved, and that its pledge to co-operate fully was apparent. Privately, several senior administrative sources at the agency questioned why nobody at Logan's office picked up the phone and queried where the rest of the file was, before deciding to press the nuclear button. The Ombudman's office declined to comment any further other than a statement last weekend, in which it said that Logan would study the file which had been handed to Logan's office over "the coming weeks," before any decision would be taken over whether the investigation could be reopened. There was no outstanding information being sought at present, HSE sources said.
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