It is a special kind of talent to run a hospital where the building tries to kill you faster than the disease does. In the grand, tragic theater of modern healthcare, the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow has finally taken a bow. After years of shaking their heads, shrugging their shoulders, and looking at grieving families as if they were speaking a foreign language, the health board has finally admitted the obvious. Yes, the water was bad. Yes, the environment made sick children sicker.

It took them years to say this. Years. In the real world, if you serve someone a glass of poison, you go to jail. In the world of government administration and hospital boards, you launch a "public inquiry." You sit in expensive chairs for six years. You pay lawyers more money than most people will see in a lifetime. You deny everything until the very last second, hoping that everyone who remembers what happened will just get tired and go away.

Let’s look at the sheer brilliance of this bureaucracy. We have Molly Cuddihy. A fifteen-year-old girl. She wasn't just fighting rare bone cancer; she was studying for her exams. She was doing her part. She was trying to live a life while her body fought a war. And what did the hospital do? It gave her an environment that attacked her. Molly told them in 2021 that the place gave her "frightening" fits. She told them she was made sicker by the very building supposed to heal her.

Molly knew. Her family knew. The other families knew. But the people in charge? Oh, they couldn't possibly know. To admit they knew would be inconvenient. It would look bad on a report. It might damage the "reputation" of the hospital. And as we all know, the reputation of a concrete building is much more important than the life of a teenager.

The families are calling this "deceit and cowardice." That is polite. I would call it standard operating procedure. This is how the system works. It is designed to protect the people at the top, not the patients in the beds. When you accuse a health board of poisoning patients with dirty water, they don't check the pipes first. They check their legal insurance. They hold meetings about "messaging." They worry about bad headlines. The truth is just an annoyance to them. It is something to be managed, spun, and delayed.

Now, finally, the denial has ended. The inquiry has heard the admissions. But look at the timing. "Molly never got to hear it," the headlines say. That is the knife in the heart of this whole farce. The admission of guilt came too late for the person who needed to hear it most. It is a hollow victory. It is like apologizing to a house after you have already burned it to the ground.

Why did it take a six-year inquiry to figure out that contaminated water causes infections? This is not rocket science. It is not advanced philosophy. If the water has bacteria in it, people get sick. A child in primary school could understand this. But put a dozen administrators in a boardroom, and suddenly, reality becomes foggy. Suddenly, facts are "allegations." Sickness is "coincidental."

This is the European way of handling disaster. We don't fix it; we form a committee. We talk about it until the words lose all meaning. We produce thousands of pages of reports that say, "mistakes were made," but we never point a finger at the specific person who made them. The health board admits the link now because they have no other choice. They are cornered. The evidence is piled so high they can't see over it anymore.

Do not mistake this admission for an apology. An apology requires a soul. An apology requires feeling bad about what you did. This is just a legal maneuver. This is a white flag waved only after the battle is already lost and the damage is done. The families fought a battle they should never have had to fight. They had to prove that the sky is blue and that dirty water is dangerous.

So, raise a glass of tap water—if you dare—to the brave bureaucrats of Glasgow. They finally told the truth. It only cost them their dignity, their credibility, and the precious, stolen time of the patients they were sworn to protect. What a performance. Truly, a masterpiece of incompetence.