CHRISTOPHER O’DRISCOLL’S mother said she believed that the HSE had “let down” her son, particularly in the last few months of his life when he was suffering from pneumonia and was abusing drugs while in the care of the agency.
Miriam Hayes said that she had last seen Christopher some six months before he died on May 8th, 2009 and, on that occasion, he seemed to be in reasonable health and wasn’t abusing heroin though he had a history of self harm.
“I was shocked when I heard Christopher had died. I never expected that even though he was suicidal for years, but the psychiatrist said he wasn’t even though he had been cutting himself – Christopher was on a slippery slope especially after his sister died 12 months previous,” she said.
Ms Hayes said that she believed the HSE had given up on Christopher in the end and she was critical of their failure to report him missing to gardaí after he was forced to leave Jury’s Inn in Cork on May 2nd, just a day after he had been booked in there by a HSE social worker.
Describing her son as “a fun-loving boy with a great sense of humour”, Ms Hayes said that her son wasn’t willing to take help when it was offered to him.
However, she nonetheless felt more could have been done for him.
“He was under-age and in their care, if they could have got an order committing him to some psychiatric ward, where he couldn’t get up and walk out, and give him a chance to get off the drugs and get his head well, it might have changed things for him and turned his life around,” she said.
The HSE extended its sympathy to Ms Hayes and her family on Christopher’s death and said the circumstances of his death had been notified to the Independent Review Group into Child Deaths established earlier this year by Minister for Children Barry Andrews.
