Many questionable answers in McCole case

THE case of Mrs Brigid McCole refuses to go away. Too many questions remain unanswered, and too many answers remain questionable.

On Radio Ireland's Daybreak programme yesterday, for instance, the Democratic Left leader, Mr Proinsias De Rossa, said that the Government, at the time of the case, "didn't know Brigid McCole was on the verge of dying".

Yet in April 1996, in the High Court, Dr Garry Courtney, a consultant at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, submitted an affidavit in the case of Brigid Ellen McCole versus the Blood Transfusion Services Board, the National Drugs Advisory Board and the Minister for Health. He believed, he told the court, that Mrs McCole "may develop decompensated liver disease within several months which could arise without warning".

If this happened, he said, she would be "unlikely to be able to give evidence or to participate in any meaningful way in her legal proceedings". Dr Courtney's prediction was, sadly, all too accurate. The cause of death on Mrs McCole's death certificate was given as "decompensated liver disease" due to "hepatitis C infection". To pretend now that the Government did not know that Mrs McCole was in danger of dying while State agencies attempted to delay the hearing of her case is rather extraordinary.

Meanwhile, the continuing failure of the Government to reveal the precise nature of its role in the whole saga serves to draw attention to one of the promises it made on taking up office and which it has not yet fulfilled. In its programme for government, published in December 1994, the Rainbow Coalition undertook to bring forward a referendum on cabinet confidentiality.

It could hardly have done otherwise. In his famous speech before the 1992 general election, Dick Spring made it clear that open government could not be reconciled with absolute cabinet confidentiality. "This is the Taoiseach," he said of Albert Reynolds, "who promised open government, but whose government fought in the Supreme Court to establish a system of cabinet secrecy that flies in the face of that promise."

Yet the commitment to changing the Constitution to allow for the revelation of cabinet discussions in certain limited circumstances (such as those presented by the McCole case) was to the say the least rather shaky. Last November, John Bruton outlined in the Dail six reasons for not proceeding with the promised reform. It would be, he said "a major change in the constitutional practices maintained in this country for a long time and may not be one that one would wish to make". He added: "I am not saying for certain that we will find an appropriate form of amendment we can stand over". This position, in turn, was changed earlier this year and it was widely expected that the referendum would he held in tandem with the general election on June 6th. The draft legislation for the referendum, however, was not published until just before the dissolution of the Dail, and it remains exactly what it was when the Government took office two and a half years ago - a promise. So long as that promise remains unfulfilled the attitude that has marked the Government's stance on the McCole case - that the conduct of the State is none of the public's business - will be underpinned by the Constitution of what is supposed to be a democratic state.

On the issue of tax, the Progressive Democrats continued to insist over the weekend that the real issue was one of trust: only those with a record of delivering tax cuts could be trusted to do so again. In this regard Michael McDowell's speech to the PD annual conference two and a half years ago makes interest ing reading. He attacked the "wretched" performance of the then government "in the area of reforming and reducing the tax burden on employment".

In 1993 that government "while mouthing platitudes about the Culliton report, imposed an income levy". And when that "bad, mad levy was challenged, its critics were ignored until the trade unions joined in. Even then its abolition this year in the 1994 Budget was fiercely resisted by (the minister for finance) and his Department .. . If any other OECD finance minister proposed or defended such a tax regime he wouldn't just be visited by `men in grey suits'; he would be taken away by `men in white coats'." Who was this mad, bad minister for finance? None other than Bertie Ahern.

Michael McDowell added, rather interestingly, that although the PDs made "substantial progress on tax reform between 1989 and 1992", when they were in government with their prospective partners, they had been forced to "fight every inch of the way against Fianna Fail".