The worst thing than can happen to anyone is the death of their child. For whereas we are partially programmed to accept our own deaths, and those of loved ones older than us, we are totally lacking in the emotional equipment to cope with an offspring's demise.
Every vulnerability is invoked: the unfairness of fate for choosing you for this condign and terrible bereavement; the inversion of the natural order, which rules that the old die before the young; the theft of life from those who have never sampled it fully, while old people's homes are full of wailing relics who have experienced life to excess and want nothing better than for it to end.
But merely to recognise that parents of dead children have suffered an unendurable blow shouldn't mean that one inversion of a moral order should then lead to another. For the moral order of our lives is that we shed parts as we grow. The teeth that I grew soon after birth are all gone, I know not where. My hair - such as it is that remains - has been replaced throughout my life; and I have probably lost a couple of yards of finger- and toe-nails. I shed skin the entire time. Not a living cell of mine today was a cell of mine 20 years ago. Vitality is a baton that is passed from old cells to new ones.
That's life. Those who lose limbs through surgery or an accident, don't ask to have the amputated part put aside, to be kept until that happy day when they can all be finally reunited in flame or clay. No indeed. Moreover, hospitals dispose of inner organs they remove; they do not run a reunion service for tonsils and wombs and other pieces that misbehave and are therefore removed, to be kept in cold storage until the rest of the body is ready to follow them.
The State should never have indulged the emotional misjudgments of distraught parents of dead children by calling the Dunne inquiry into unauthorised tissue extraction from dead children, upon which €15 million has already been needlessly squandered. Anne Dunne SC is no doubt a splendid barrister, but what can she discover? What we already know - that matter was secretly removed from infantile cadavers. This should not have happened; indeed, it was very wrong that it happened. But it did, and that's that.
For the doctors who performed these extractions did so in good faith. The chairwoman of the Parents for Justice group, Fionnuala O'Reilly, said this week that the revelation that pituitary glands taken from children had been given to a pharmaceutical company "for a profit-making purpose" - to make human-growth hormone - was "shocking".
No it's not. To be sure, "profits" were made by the companies which processed the tissue. But profit is the engine of business, and living children with dwarfism were enabled to have normal lives through by-products from the pituitary glands taken from infant corpses. This is surely a good thing; and the last thing any parents would have wanted was the market value of the more profitable tissue of their dead children.
The body parts of a dead child are as meaningless as the body parts of a living person, and it is fetishising what is no more than lifeless tissue to pretend that it might properly have some special emotional and moral value to the parents, deserving of the respect and ceremony of a human corpse.
Yet formal funerals have recently been given to the tissue of long-dead children in England after post-mortem discovery. One family there has now had half-a-dozen interment services for the fragmentary remains of a child whose corpse was buried over 10 years ago, but from which, soon after death, tiny samples had been extracted from different parts and retained for medical examination in separate laboratories. As each cluster of tissue was found, it too was given a full funeral.
Grotesque is not too strong a word to describe this grisly sanctification of lifeless matter.
Merely because this is a deeply sensitive question doesn't mean we should allow ourselves be bullied into publicly accepting what we don't privately believe. Quite the opposite: we should brace ourselves against the sanctimoniously aggressive, who have been setting the moral tone for such little debate as has occurred so far. Sadly, RTÉ radio news the other day discussed the fate of tiny body parts with the stricken solemnity that it would accord the lives of the babies who had once owned them. This is playing to the gallery of the pious, ab initio surrendering the intellectual and moral arguments to those who have clearly lost all sense of proportion.
For Parents for Justice are not just demanding a full statutory inquiry into the affair; they also say that the families of every single person upon whom a post mortem had been performed in the past 30 years might well be affected by the organ retention "scandal". Now they're really scaring me, for this could involve investigating thousands and thousands of post-mortems.
The Government should bring the curtain down on all further inquiry immediately, as the behemoth of compensation lurches over the horizon. Law-suits against hospitals which extracted tiny amounts of tissue from dead children have begun in England.
Irish lawyers are preparing to follow suit, with the appalling vista of post-mortems of up to 30 years ago becoming subjects of litigation. Minister: this lunacy is bottomless. Let Annie back to the law library and end it all now.