“Latest HSE compo claim vindicates my concern around whistleblower retaliation.” Ken O’Flynn
Independent Ireland TD Ken O’Flynn has said that confirmation of a HSE compensation award to the doctor who exposed serial wrongdoing at the South Kerry Children and Adolescent Mental Health Service (Camhs) has strengthened his resolve to root out the culture of retaliation that is prevalent against whistleblowers in Ireland.
The Cork North-Central TD has been to the forefront of his party’s efforts to significantly revise and improve protections offered to whistleblowers, many of whom he says, “soon find out, after the fact and to their personal and professional cost just how duplicitous and threadbare the legislative protections currently in place really are.”
Deputy O’Flynn was speaking after it was reported that a payment of €75,000 has been granted to Dr Maya Sharma, formerly Dr Ankur Sharma, following a case taken by him against the HSE following his exposure of the scandal at the South Kerry Children and Adolescent Mental Health Service:
“Here we have a respected and conscientious medical professional who was hounded, ostracised and penalised for daring to speak up in a situation where proof of significant harm was later found in relation to 46 children. He was effectively used as an institutional punching bag by a management regime determined to downplay and minimise the scale of their own pathetic failures.”
“This is a damning indictment of how whistleblowers are being treated on a routine basis. The doctor in this case felt he had no option but to leave the country and never return. How many more have been pushed to this extreme by a retaliatory and vindictive culture whose response to whistleblowers is not to listen but to punch them in the mouth or gag them through the imposition of onerous legal costs and the threat of reputational annihilation?”
“I am determined to continue my campaign of strengthening whistleblower protections in order to ensure that we can root out the rot from the very services that the public reply on.”
