WHATEVER about the noble concept of cherishing all the children equally, it apparently does not extend to some people who are facing certain death from illness.
There's clear evidence that some of the terminally ill are not being cherished equally by our Government.
It might be said that they are not being cherished at all by the State, even though by all accounts the public coffers are awash with money. It will be interesting to see if anything in the Government's policy towards these people changes when details of the Budget are announced tomorrow.
I'm referring specifically to the western and north western parts of our country, where efforts to establish hospices for people in the final stages of illness have drawn an uncaring, if not indeed callous, response from the State.
In Galway city a hospice building has been completed in Renmore at a cost of £2 million and a home care palliative service for terminally ill cancer cases has been established at a cost of £1.5 million and rising.
These developments were made possible by donations from the public over the past few years. So far not a single penny has come from the State to support this most worthy of causes undertaken by the Galway Hospice Foundation.
There was a paltry £30,000 handout from the National Lottery in 1992 and an even more paltry £5,000 from the same source last year; but the state purse has remained firmly closed to the dying people of the west.
The Galway Hospice Foundation has been pleading for funds from the Department of Health since 1989, without success. Its 12 to 14 bed hospice building has now been completed, but it cannot be used until it is fully furnished, equipped and staffed, and this will depend on the Department relenting and providing the funds.
The running costs for the Galway hospice will amount to more than £1 million a year, and clearly this cannot be met by any voluntary group without considerable Government help.
It is a similar story in the north west where efforts have been under way for the past 10 years to set up a hospice service, including an in patient unit in Sligo town to serve Sligo county, Leitrim and a large part of Mayo.
An eight bed hospice unit is nearing completion in the grounds of Sligo General Hospital, largely through the donations of ordinary people, but it too will need financial help from the State for equipping and continuing operational costs.
In the case of the north west hospice, Michael Noonan seems to be adopting an odd sort of laissez faire stance. The Minister does not wish to deal directly with the hospice organisation but wants any state money that goes to it to be channelled through the North Western Health Board.
In this way the hospice has received a grossly inadequate £40,000, while the institutionalised tokenism of the National Lottery has yielded a pitiful £20,000. With the north west hospice already paying £15,000 a month in palliative home care service alone since 1989, these contributions are contemptible.
The Galway Hospice Foundation points out that the Government is funding hospices in Dublin, Cork and Limerick, it is being deprived. The result is that advanced cancer patients cannot be admitted to Galway's new hospice because it is unequipped, and unstaffed.
Michael Noonan, being a Limerick man, might be able to explain some anomalies thrown up, in research carried out by north west hospice supporters.
They found that the Department of Health grant for hospice services in the Minister's own Limerick area for 1994 was 16 times greater than that allocated, to the north west, even though the Limerick area's population is only, three times as big. No doubt the Limerick Minister has a perfectly, acceptable explanation.