Muckamore families demand accountability ahead of inquiry report

The families are members of Action for Muckamore (AFM) and the Society for Parents and Friends of Muckamore Abbey Hospital (SPFMAH). Between them, their loved ones’ experience of the hospital spans almost 75 years – from within a year of its opening to the present day. Their loved ones were among the most vulnerable people in society: people with learning disabilities and mental ill-health, many of them non-verbal, admitted to what was meant to be a specialist hospital that would assess, treat, care for and protect them.

Instead, over a prolonged period, patients were subjected to physical, sexual, psychological and emotional abuse, and to the neglect of their most basic needs. The true scale only became clear through CCTV. An early review in 2018 examined around 20 minutes of footage; the police investigation, Operation Turnstone, has since reviewed in the region of 300,000 hours.

Claire McKeegan, partner at Phoenix Law representing the families, said: “The families I represent entrusted the people they love most to a hospital that was supposed to keep them safe, and that trust was betrayed in the most appalling way. They have carried that pain for years, and many are carrying it still. This report must do justice to what their loved ones suffered. It must name the failures honestly, and it must be the moment the system finally takes responsibility – not only the front-line staff, but those at the top who held the power and the duty to prevent this, and did not.”

The families want to see: a properly funded and properly staffed community-based learning disability service; rigorous, modern governance and oversight, including the proper use of CCTV in community placements and a family’s right to access footage relating to their own loved one; leadership and a regulator with genuine knowledge of learning disability services; strong, independent advocacy; the formal regulation of healthcare assistants; and a statutory duty of candour — which Northern Ireland, alone in the UK, still does not have. They are also calling for a dedicated mechanism to investigate individual cases and secure accountability, and for a remedial scheme to provide support, treatment and redress for patients and families.

The families also wish to remember Geraldine O’Hagan, who gave evidence to the inquiry in her final days.