If you live in Ireland you might remember this bit of news reported by the national broadcaster RTÉ and other news outlets on 10 November of last year:

Harris ‘furious’ over HSE bed memo

Minister for Health Simon Harris has said he is “furious” over a HSE memo that said nurses could remove patients from beds “as trespassers” using minimum force in order to free up acute beds for patients who need them.

The Health Service Executive’s National Director of Acute Hospitals, Liam Woods, has apologised for any concern caused by the memo for hospital managers, which was seen by RTÉ News.

The memo was written by the HSE’s legal advisors and issued to Mr Woods on 11 October.

Yesterday, I checked out the Facebook page Amanda Denton’s partner Tommy maintains, called: “The help Amanda Denton get rehabilitation page“. The first post on this page is ‘pinned’, dated 21 July 2016, and reads as follows – apparently reporting an incident the HSE said would never happen:

At the end there is a link to a youtube video documenting the incident.

There was also an article in The Irish Times by Kitty Holland last August reporting on Amanda’s ‘treatment’.

i’ve been told on several occasions by several people to be careful about what I am writing in my blog. In fact, I had to agree not to write about certain things. The reason? – Mostly legal, I suppose. Ireland is a country were people and organisations like to sue each other for libel. And then: you wouldn’t want to upset anybody or fall out with anyone – after all, everybody is trying their best.

I met Tommy and Amanda when Pádraig was in the NRH. I know that there are different perspectives on everything. But tonight, I thought: there comes a time when you become so desperate that ending up in court for libel really becomes the least of your worries.

If you have a look at Tommy’s blog you’ll see that there are hundreds of people around the world sharing this view.

On a completely different note: it’s Pádraig’s big sister’s birthday today and we celebrated this very special day with her, with Pádraig and the rest of the family around a big warm fire, defying the bitterly cold January evening that it is in Dublin tonight. We are not just celebrating her birthday, but also the wonderful and very talented person she has become.