Remarks by President McAleese on the Occasion of the Official Opening of the Cystic Fibrosis Unit
Our Lady's Children's Hospital, Crumlin, Dublin, Thursday, 4th October, 2011.
Dia dhíbh go léir inniu. Tá an-áthas orm bheith anseo libh ar an ócáid speisialta
Archbishop, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls – good afternoon to you all.
Thank you for the very warm welcome back to Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital. Thanks to Lorcan Birthistle and the Board Members for inviting me to this long-anticipated red letter day for the Hospital and for all who live with Cystic Fibrosis.
As the National Referral Centre for Paediatric Cystic Fibrosis, the opening today of the new Paediatric Cystic Fibrosis Unit and the newly renovated St Michael’s ward is a watershed moment for the Hospital management and staff and, most especially, for the children who suffer from cystic fibrosis and their families. It is the children and their families who know only too well the many anxieties they have to live. Among them is the danger of cross-infection, of being more vulnerable rather than less, in a hospital where a child is receiving needed treatment. So the opening of this new unit and the renovated St. Michaels’s Ward will be greeted with a huge sense of welcome and relief by the children who suffer from CF, the parents who love them and worry about them and the medical staff who want to give the best possible care to their patients.
Ireland is said to have the greatest proportion of people with Cystic Fibrosis in the world. 1100 of our citizens face life with CF every single day and this day is a triumph for them and for all those who advocated, lobbied and pleaded for so long for first-class facilities that would indeed show us to be a nation capable of “cherishing all the children of the nation equally.”
People with CF fight every day to keep well. Parents of children with this disease fight to keep their children healthy and preferably out of hospital but when hospitalisation becomes inevitable these new facilities will greatly ease their anxieties. In particular of course the four new en-suite rooms, the first dedicated isolation rooms for children with CF in Ireland, will be a Godsend. They may be limited in number but they will make a real difference by allowing access to treatment within the controlled environment of the rooms and minimising the risk of infection.
I understand that, since these refurbished rooms were opened, the feedback from patients and families using them has been universally positive. It has even been rumoured that, such is the quality of the entertainment facilities, some children have expressed a wish to stay in the ward even after treatment has been completed!
Helen Keller said that “although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it”. We owe a massive debt of thanks to The Cystic Fibrosis Association of Ireland for providing funding for the development of this unit and for all the work of overcoming that has been done on behalf of CF sufferers in terms of treatment, facilities information, advice and the all-important research which it is hoped will in the end comprehensively overcome CF.
I pay tribute also to the Children’s Medical and Research Foundation for their faithful financial support of the hospital including in this instance the renovation of
St Michael’s Ward, providing for twenty-two state of the art beds, cardiac and respiratory equipment and a playroom. Each member of staff who works here gives their best no matter what the state of the bricks and mortar but I am sure that these spacious and pleasant new facilities and resources will energise them and create an even more rewarding place to work.
This entire project has come to fruition because of dogged determination and an ambition to improve life for those with CF. The journey is far from over but this is a very good point at which to stop just for a moment and draw breath in celebration of a milestone reached and a new more optimistic era that will follow because of it. That same drive and capacity for hard work, for struggling against the odds, is the energy that will change the future for CF patients. I hope this new unit will have even more stories of achievement reached in the years ahead.
I wish everybody associated with this outstanding venture - staff, friends, donors and particularly patients and their families - every success in the future.
Go n-eirí an t-adh libh go léir!