The complacency of Dr Woods and the dilapidation of St Brendan's
During a radio interview on Wednesday, October 15, the Minister for Health, Dr. Woods, stated that many of the photographs published in the October issue of Magill depicting the state of mental hospitals were of a building in St. Brendan's Hospital, Grangegorman, Dublin, and that this building had since been evacuated. The point of his remarks was to suggest that we have exaggerated the condition of mental hospitals and of St. Brendan's in particular.
We visited St. Brendan's Hospital again five days after the Minister's comments, on October 20, and discovered that the building in question had not yet been fully evacuated. Twenty-nine chronically disturbed female patients were still being accommodated there as shown in the accompanying photograph which was taken also on October 20.
Magill had acknowledged in the October issue that this building, called the main block, was in the process of evacuation, having accommodated 160 patients up to a few months ago. It was in this building that part of the roof had collapsed onto a patient's bed.
About 30 of the 160 patients formerly accommodated here were sent to Cherry Orchard Hospital. Another 18 were sent to the geriatric section of Vergemount Hospital. Twenty-four male patients have been moved into a new block at St. Brendan's but this is only a temporary measure and they will be moved elsewhere shortly.
The remaining 60 patients have been scattered throughout the rest of the St. Brendan's Hospital complex and the state of many of these buildings is even worse than the building from which they have been moved.
Over four hundred patients in St. Brendan's Hospital are accommodated in buildings which have been condemned and all these patients are deemed by the hospital authorities to be in danger of their lives.
Block LMN, beside the CIE bus garage at Broadstone, was one of the subjects of an architect's report six months ago. The architect, Mr. John Inglis recommended the "immediate evacuation and demolition"of this building. Now, six months later, one hundred and twenty women are housed there.
This was the building in St. Brendan's visited by Dr. Woods shortly after he became Minister for Health in December of last year. Dr. Ivor Browne recalls that when the Minister and his party visited the annex to this building, which accommodates the toilets, the Minister got nervous lest the building should collapse beneath them.
Two months later Dr. Woods was part of a cabinet which sanctioned the public expenditure cuts which further reduced the resources available to the psychiatric services.
The other building to cause alarm at St. Brendan's is the Lower House. Part of this building has recently been renovated and 150 patients are accommodated there. However another 250 patients are housed in that part of the Lower House where consulting engineers have recently found areas of wet rot, dry rot and wood worm in the roofs.
Heating engineers have urgently recommended that the entire heating system be taken out and a new system
installed. The wiring system is also causing alarm.
It is to the Lower House that approximately 300 old people would be sent in the course of a normal winter here. However this winter Dr. Ivor Browne, the chief psychiatrist of St. Brendan's, has told Magill that he intends to refuse admission to all old people this winter on the grounds that the building is unsafe. He hopes that his action will cause the kind of confrontation with the health authorities, principally the Department of Health, which alone he believes will lead to a radical re-appraisal of the en tire service.
(Magill will continue with this investigation.)