Ireland

THE MESSAGE: WHEN PUBLIC POLICY GOES WRONG

Junior Health Minister Alex White has answered the 27 Questions on fluoride, put to him by Hot Press. Will he want to stand over the answers in 10 years’ time?

Niall Stokes, 09 May 2013

And so we finally have the answers. Those who have been following our investigation into the mandatory fluoridation of the water supply in Ireland will be intrigued to see what the Minister with responsibility for fluoridation policy, Alex White, has to say in response to the 27 detailed questions put to him in these pages three issues ago.

In the spirit of fairness, we have decided to print the answers in full, without editorial intervention. In recent months, we have given a huge amount of space to the arguments against fluoride. Its defendants are entitled to have their case heard too.

Upfront, it has to be stated that – spread over six pages of the magazine – for the uninvolved it does not exactly make riveting reading. A lot of what is being said is technical. It would be unfair to blame that on the Minister or his advisers in the department – or indeed the ‘expert body’ on fluoride, whose ideology undoubtedly informs the answers. When it comes to detailed issues of public policy, more often than not, there is a lot of verbiage to wade through, in order to understand what the hell is going on and why................

...................Health is a huge brief. The scope for things going wrong is, it has to be acknowledged, wide. But to say that the performance of the Department of Health has not been good over the years is to understate it. I hope that their defence of the fluoridation of the water supply does not become something that in the future they – or their successors – will come to very seriously regret.