After waiting 7 years for vital spinal surgery, 9-year-old Harvey Morrison Sherratt died on 29 July. For years, his parents battled endless waiting lists, cancellations and delays – only to be met with criminal indifference and broken promises.
All the while, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil ministers filled the airwaves with empty rhetoric about their supposed commitment to fixing children’s healthcare. All of them are now to blame – chief among them current Tánaiste and Fine Gael leader Simon Harris.
Back in 2017, as Minister for Health, Harris declared he was “ashamed” of the scoliosis crisis and pledged that by the end of that year no child would “wait longer than four months” for surgery. That was just around the time Harvey was first told he needed surgery – a surgery that didn’t come for another 7 years.
That promise was repeated time and again by successive ministers. Yet today, 74 children are still waiting longer than four months – up 155 percent since Harris’s pledge.
Here it is: yet another broken promise by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. But it is not them who pay the price. It is the most vulnerable in our society. Harvey’s mother summed it all up:
“In actual fact, [Simon Harris] doesn’t care at all. Couldn’t even take the time to meet us when we were begging for help. We will never have another moment of peace, and we endeavour to ensure that anyone that failed Harvey doesn’t either.”
A system that cannot even provide basic healthcare for severely ill children is a system that must be swept away.
Justice for Harvey
Harvey’s parents were first told he would need an operation to prevent his spine from crushing his ribcage when he was still a toddler. By February 2024, his curvature was so severe he struggled to breathe. His father publicly pleaded: “Harvey will die. He absolutely needs the surgery.”
Yet six months later, his name had been inexplicably removed from the active waiting list – even as his scoliosis was reaching a life-threatening 130-degree curve. The operation eventually came in December 2024. But by then, his condition was so advanced that surgery could not undo the years of damage due to the criminal delays. He died just eight months later.
This horrific story has struck a chord with workers and youth across Ireland, who know only too well the misery of trying to access healthcare when you can’t afford to go private or to travel abroad. What a terrible reminder of what effects the broken promises and lies of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have on the most vulnerable in our society.
Indeed, Harvey’s parents have vowed to keep fighting – and thousands are joining them. #ResignHarris and #JusticeForHarvey were trending on social media this week. A petition calling for Harris’ resignation has already gathered over 30,000 signatures, and a GoFundMe to support a protest in Dublin raised nearly €3,000 in its first week.
Simon Harris must go! And more – the problem is deeper than just him, the whole system has to go!
CHI in permanent crisis
Harvey’s death shone a light on the deep crisis in Children’s Health Ireland (CHI), founded in 2018 but mired in scandals ever since: unnecessary hip surgeries, industrial springs used in operations, children abandoned in hospitals after substandard care, and relentless cover-ups.
On top of this is the never-ending fiasco of the National Children’s Hospital – delayed for more than 5 years already and now costing €2.24 billion, more than double its original estimate.
Each time a new scandal comes up, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael ministers express ‘sorrow’, call for ‘reviews’, and promise ‘change’ – crocodile tears designed to buy time and shift blame. In reality, they are the ones who have deliberately run down Ireland’s health service into a state of permanent crisis.
Indeed, it is not just CHI, the crisis is generalised all across HSE. Today, 785,000 people are on waiting lists – up 70 percent in a decade – including 85,000 children. Disability services too are on the point of collapse, as Harvey’s case highlighted – according to his father, he received virtually no care after 2019.
Successive budgets have starved the HSE. Budget 2024 allocated €2 billion less for healthcare than what was required just to stand still. Budget 2025’s much-touted “record spending” barely plugged gaps, leaving systemic collapse untouched.
Then there is the creeping privatisation and the corrupt logic that comes with it. The National Treatment Purchase Fund, designed to reduce waiting lists by paying for private treatment, in practice incentivised consultants to keep public lists long so they can profit from their private practice. This is capitalism at its most perverse.
The truth is that Ireland’s healthcare has never recovered from the savage cuts imposed after the 2008 crisis. Hospital bed numbers, for instance, collapsed from 4.85 per 1,000 people in 2008 to 2.83 in 2009, and remain at a similar level today. After 17 years of cuts, the whole system is now overwhelmed: GPs, emergency services, hospitals, disability services, CHI, intensive care units, etc.
As the crisis of capitalism deepens, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael will continue to protect the interests of the rich and powerful – of the ruling class and of the imperialists – even if it means that working-class people, and even children, must pay with their lives.
That is the inescapable logic of capitalism.
The whole system has the go!
Yet those same people that lecture us about the need for spending restraints, always seem to find money when it comes to militarisation, corporate tax breaks, or subsidies to landlords, data centres and their capitalist cronies.
Enough is enough. It is the working class that produces society’s wealth – yet under capitalism it is workers and their families who carry the heaviest burden of the crisis.
Only by sweeping aside this rotten system and fighting for a socialist alternative – including a health service run democratically by workers, fully funded by expropriating the wealth of billionaires into public ownership – can tragedies like Harvey’s be prevented in future.
Big Pharma alone amassed a staggering €572 billion in European profits last year, and their total value runs in the trillions. That wealth alone would be enough to fund top quality healthcare for everyone – and many times over.
We say: Justice for Harvey! Resign, Harris! Down with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael! For a free, fully founded healthcare system – and a Socialist United Ireland!
