Furious Judge hauls HSE top brass before court

Date Published: 08-Nov-2012

BY ANN HEALY

A Circuit Court Judge has requested the Regional Director of HSE West, John Hennessy, and its area manager in Community Care to attend court next week to explain why funding for services required to treat a teenage boy, who poses a serious threat to young women in the Salthill area, have been withdrawn.

Judge Gerard Griffin said: “It is something that amazes me in all my time on the bench that they (the HSE) seem to send in (to court) Senior Counsel, Junior Counsel and solicitors who charge €800 an hour and then say they have no money.

“I will give the HSE time to sort this out and I want the CEO of HSE West and Ms Catherine Cunningham (HSE Area Manager in Primary, Continuing and Community Care) to attend court next week unless the matter has been addressed,” the judge said.

Holding up a letter signed by Ms. Cunningham, containing just one line acknowledging receipt of correspondence from a psychiatrist in the Central Mental Hospital who recommended the youth receive long-term, ongoing HSE residential care and psychiatric treatment, Judge Griffin said he was “entirely unhappy” with the reply from the HSE which did not even address the concerns and recommendations made by the psychiatrist.

The judge said he was not going to abandon this young man. “Jail is not where he should be. He needs psychiatric help and some effort should be made to give him that.”

The subject of the lengthy debate, Tyrone Crockford (19), who has been in custody since his arrest on January 6 last, sat smiling to himself as the judge and barristers discussed the HSE’ s handling of his case.

He pleaded guilty to three counts of attempted robbery and one count of using a knife in the course of one of the attacks.

Earlier, three Gardai had given evidence of how he had attempted to rob three young women in separate incidents as they walked home in Salthill around teatime. Two of the attempted robberies had occurred on November 19 last year and a third occurred on January 4 last.

The court heard the women were traumatized by the incidents.

For more on this story, see the Galway City Tribune.