‘This is your legacy’, Cork mother of disabled daughter tells Taoiseach

A Cork mother has confronted Irish premier Micheal Martin about the healthcare treatments available to her daughter Katie, who has cerebral palsy.

Antoinette Burke said Katie, 18, could get life-changing but expensive surgery in the US.

She said that if her daughter had received the operation at the age of four, she would not need a hip replacement now.

She confronted the Taoiseach as he arrived for the Fianna Fail think-in in Cork and said she had first contacted his office 15 years ago.

She told the Taoiseach that her daughter has hip dysplasia, a retroverted pelvis, a twisted femur and that one leg is shorter than the other.

“Nobody in this country will do anything for her, Katie needs help and I can’t stand by when you are all standing here, you’re going in there to talk about healthcare and this is your legacy,” she said.

“This is 15 years on the 24th of this month that Katie will be waiting on surgery.”

Ms Burke said she had requested meetings with Tanaiste Simon Harris and Health Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill about her daughter’s case.

Mr Martin told her that “for some reason, the clinical consultants have made a judgment”.

Chief Whip Mary Butler offered to take Ms Burke’s details and was told that she was informed about the case in the Dail two years ago.

“I’ve been contacting Micheal Martin’s office since 2010 and it’s only the last year that we’ve got a response, and it’s from his secretary, it’s not from him,” Ms Burke said.

“Pat Buckley from Sinn Fein has brought Katie’s case up three times in the Dail and every time it’s ‘leave it with me’, ‘leave it with me’, ‘leave it with me’.

“I needed some way to tell him because I don’t know if his secretaries are telling him when I’m sending emails in because they probably get hundreds. When I saw it this morning, I said ‘I’m going over, he needs to know’.”

Mr Martin said that Katie’s case was not “necessarily emblematic” of families who have to fight for disability services.

“What it could reflect though is the relationships between the clinical world and families and parents,” he said.

“I read the note that Antoinette sent me there, and there’s been a lot of interaction with very, very senior consultants in this field, in paediatric surgery, particularly orthopaedic paediatric surgery, who – apparently, from that note – are saying that they didn’t believe that surgery was the right course of action, and they either refused or took a decision not to do it on clinical grounds.

“But I would have to explore that further with the consultants concerned.

“It’s a very, very difficult case for a mother, and obviously the struggle and the journey for that family has been a long one from the day the lady was born and born prematurely, and has been engaged with services on an ongoing basis.

“It is a very, very difficult and painful journey for families, and families and mothers want the best for their child. I understand that fully, and mothers and fathers will do everything for their child, and that means, at times, very difficult engagements with consultants and clinicians.

“I think clinicians make their best judgments in respect of the timing of surgery and I’ve come across this in many cases where people are anxious to get the surgery, clinicians are saying ‘not yet’ or ‘we don’t believe it is clinically justified’.

“On the other hand, if surgeons believe that they can’t do it here, there is a treatment-abroad scheme, and I’ve often referred parents myself through the treatment-abroad scheme, and it has been effective.

“But again, it needs sign-off from international clinicians before you can be treated abroad under the treatment-abroad scheme. And I always say to professionals and to all of us here, that we have to always try and look at these cases through the prism of the family and the mother and father and the child.

“But this case has been ongoing for some time from the file, and there clearly has been disagreement in respect of clinical decisions on this and that makes it very difficult, from a political perspective, to overly interfere and sort of instruct doctors to carry out surgery.”

The two-day Fianna Fail think-in was taking place in Douglas in Co Cork ahead of the Dail parliament returning on Wednesday.

Among the issues on the agenda was the budget, the cost of living, the housing crisis and the presidential election.

Fianna Fail’s presidential candidate Jim Gavin canvassed around the area ahead of arriving at the think-in on Monday afternoon.

Mr Martin said Budget 2025 would prioritise housing, child poverty and disability services.

He said the significant cost of food prices would have to be addressed in the budget, and said it would be a “targeted approach” to those for whom the cost of living was most acute.

“The Government is not going to do subsidies or anything like that,” he said.

On a second tier of child benefit, he said: “Things are not ready for a new payment structure this term, but they will have measures that are more or less equivalent to second child benefit criteria for those on the lowest incomes.”

He also said that the global situation was “turbulent” and “dangerous” when referring to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“I spoke with Prime Minister (Sir) Keir Starmer on Friday on a range of issues, including legacy, but we did focus on this and as the British prime minister said to me – ‘Is it an accident that the European Union building in Kyiv is bombed, that the British Council building in Kyiv is bombed, and that these drone incursions into EU states is (evidenced).

“So it looks like a manifestation of extreme recklessness on behalf of President Putin.

“It’s serious and sometimes in Ireland we underestimate the level of insecurity on the eastern flank of Europe, and particularly in terms of the Baltic states and others, they really fear Russia’s agenda, and it is something that we need to be very conscious of.”