Muckamore Abbey Hospital Inquiry report: “Families say the time for accountability and lasting change is now

PRESS RELEASE | For immediate release

Thursday 18 June 2026

The families of patients who were abused at Muckamore Abbey Hospital will today receive the long-awaited findings of the Muckamore Abbey Hospital Public Inquiry.

For the families, who fought for years to bring the Inquiry about, the report is a pivotal moment in their campaign. They say today must be the point at which those responsible are finally held to account.

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.

The allegations of abuse spam from within a year of Muckamore’s opening to the present day. Those loved ones were among the most vulnerable people in our society, which included people with learning disabilities and mental ill-health diagnosis, 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. The true scale only became clear through CCTV.

An early review in 2018 examined around twenty minutes of footage and led to the PSNI investigation (“Operation Turnstone”) reviewing in the region of 300,000 hours. The footage laid bare a level of cruelty, casual violence and indifference to suffering that no report or statistic could ever convey.

For the families, the betrayal of trust is profound. Many had cared for their relatives at home for as long as they possibly could and turned to Muckamore only at a moment of crisis, believing their loved ones would be safe.

Families who then came to visit loved ones were turned away at the door for weeks or months and told their relative needed time to “settle in”. Some were not allowed to be at their child’s bedside. One couple, refused entry at Christmas, went back to their car and wept. The harm done — to patients and to families alike — endures to this day.

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.

— Claire McKeegan, Phoenix Law

The future safety of Patients

The families’ single greatest concern the future safety of their loved ones. They have demanded accountability.  Although many staff have been suspended and a number of former staff have faced criminal prosecution, no one at senior management, leadership or oversight level within the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust, the regulator, or the Department of Health has been held to account or has resigned.

Throughout the Inquiry, the families heard those with the greatest responsibility sought to push blame downwards. They fear that these bodies which still do not accept their own responsibility cannot be trusted to put things right.

The families are looking to the report and its recommendations to secure lasting change. In particular, they 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.

Recommendations that are welcomed in principle and then quietly forgotten will be worthless to these families — they have watched that happen too many times before. What is needed is not complicated: a properly funded, properly staffed, properly governed community service, with CCTV oversight, with real accountability when things go wrong and the money to actually deliver it. The families will be watching closely to see that the recommendations are implemented in full, and that someone is given the job of making sure they are. For the people still in Muckamore, and for those in community placements that are no better, this is a matter of safety today — not just tomorrow.

— Claire McKeegan, Phoenix Law

That urgency is real.

Some of the families’ loved ones remain in Muckamore with no clear date for discharge. Others are in community placements that the families say are as poor as — or worse than — the hospital itself. Many of the parents and carers are now elderly. They live with the knowledge that they cannot protect their loved ones for ever, and they need to know that the people they love will be safe and properly cared for when they are no longer there to watch over them.

Our clients have lost loved ones (former patients) since this process began.  This time is particularly difficult for the families of 8 of our core participants who have died before the publication of this Report.

The families also wish to remember Geraldine O’Hagan, who gave evidence to the Inquiry in her final days and whose care and advocacy for patients and families stood in stark contrast to their wider experience. For the families, she represents everything the system should aspire to be.

ENDS

Notes to editors

1. The Muckamore Abbey Hospital Public Inquiry is a statutory inquiry established under the Inquiries Act 2005, chaired by Tom Kark KC. Its terms of reference are to examine the abuse of patients at the hospital; to determine why the abuse happened and the circumstances that allowed it; and to ensure that such abuse does not happen again at MAH or at any similar institution in Northern Ireland. The Inquiry heard evidence across four phases: Patient Experience, Evidence Modules, Staff, and Organisational.
2. Action for Muckamore (AFM) and the Society for Parents and Friends of Muckamore Abbey Hospital (SPFMAH) are the two core participant groups representing the families of patients. Together they represent 46 families whose loved ones were patients at the hospital.
3. The families are represented by Claire McKeegan, Sophie McClintock and Victoria Haddock of Phoenix Law, with counsel Monye Anyadike-Danes KC, Aidan McGowan, Amy Kinney and Hannah Cullinan.
4. By the time the Inquiry opened, it had been reported that 83 members of staff had been suspended, a number had been dismissed, and there had been multiple arrests and charges; further prosecutions have followed since. These figures are stated as at the opening of the Inquiry; the PSNI investigation, Operation Turnstone, remains ongoing and the numbers may have changed.
5. Some of the most serious evidence heard by the Inquiry is subject to Restriction Orders and cannot be reported.
6. Patient identifiers (for example “P116”) are used by the Inquiry to protect the anonymity of patients.

END

Notes for Editors:

1. Any queries should be directed to the Claire McKeegan of Phoenix Law, Phoenix Law, 92 High Street, 3rd & 4th Floor, Belfast, BT1 2BG T: 028 90 32 83 83. Email: Claire@phoenix-law.org