Sinnott case shows State at its worst

Unless there are last-minute delays, the Supreme Court will today begin hearing a case that ought to be unimaginable. In the tortuous rhetoric of legalese, it is a contest between "Jamie Sinnott, a person of unsound mind not so found, suing by his mother and next friend Kathryn Sinnott" and the Minister for Education, Ireland and the Attorney General. In the plainer words of real life, it is a struggle between democracy and a distorted State. More even than all the investigations and tribunals, this case cuts to the heart of what is rotten in the public realm.

The case arises from last year's High Court ruling that Jamie Sinnott, a young man with autism, was entitled under the Constitution to a primary education. The court found that for people like Jamie, a primary education cannot be said to end at the age of 14. Essentially, the court was saying that the definition of what a basic education is cannot be simply imposed by the State but must be based on the needs of the person involved.

This ruling expressed one of the most basic ideas of a democracy: that the State should respond to the needs of its citizens, rather than the other way round. The Government's absolute determination to try to overturn the ruling therefore expresses something equally fundamental. It is an attempt to establish once and for all that citizens have only such rights as the State is willing to grant them. It is based on the profound belief that the State is an entity up there above and beyond the people, with a life and a will all of its own.

Preserving this essentially authoritarian ideal in what is supposed to be a democracy inevitably involves a great deal of downright dishonesty. The iron fist has to be hidden in a velvet glove of soothing reassurances. Thus the Minister for Education, Dr Woods, told the Dail on March 7th that "the appeal will not affect the damages or awards which have been paid to Jamie Sinnott or his mother". Mary Harney went on radio after the High Court judgment to assure the public that "what was awarded to the Sinnott family both in terms of compensation and services will be done". All along, the Government has tried to pass off the appeal as merely a technical exercise, aimed at clarifying the law for everyone's benefit.

This is a contemptible and contemptuous falsehood. Contemptible because the State's pleadings in the case make it clear that it is seeking to overturn both the principles behind Mr Justice Barr's ruling in the High Court and the damages he awarded to Jamie and Kathryn. Contemptuous because of the assumption that the public is so stupid that it will be so easily soothed by emollient phrases.

The reality is that the State's appeal represents a deep, persistent and confident strain of official thinking, whose clearest previous expression was in the case of Brigid McCole. And lest the excuse that was used in that case - good-hearted politicians led astray by cruel lawyers - be trotted out again, it is important to stress the level of political commitment that is involved here. We happen to know the State's line in the Sinnott case comes from the top, from nice, decent Bertie Ahern himself.

THE Sinnott case is rooted in a court battle fought by Marie O'Donoghue and her son, Paul. In 1992, they went to the High Court demanding that Paul, whom the State had written off as "ineducable", be given his constitutional right to a primary education. In a landmark judgment, Mr Justice O'Hanlon found in their favour. The State's appeal against the O'Donoghue judgment collapsed, and it was assumed that vastly improved services for children who had been left on the scrap heap must follow.

The person who stopped this happening, and who made the Sinnott case necessary, was the then Minister for Finance, Bertie Ahern. In July 1993, he wrote to his then colleague Niamh Bhreathnach urging that "an appeal should be lodged because of the wide implications of the [O'Donoghue] judgment".

He was adamantly opposed to the High Court's view that children like Paul O'Donoghue and Jamie Sinnott could be educated. A letter from his Department to the Department of Education stresses that "as regards the issue of the educability of children with severe and profound mental handicap, it is the strong view of the Minister that the decision of the High Court should be appealed".

At the time, the Department of Education suggested that an appeal might have a better chance of success if, for example, the pupil-teacher ratio in schools for mentally handicapped children were halved in line with the High Court ruling. Bertie Ahern insisted, however, that this could only be done within existing resources by reallocating teaching posts.

This attitude created what Mr Justice Barr in his ruling last year characterised as "the conscious, deliberate failure of finance administrators to pay due regard to and take effective steps to honour the obligations of the State to Jamie Sinnott on foot of the O'Donoghue judgment". It was nice Bertie, in other words, who forced Kathryn Sinnott to go to the High Court in the first place.

Here, perhaps, we have the real reason for the State's determination to overturn her victory in the face of widespread public revulsion. A judgment which exposes the gap between the image and the reality of how State power is used and how Bertie Ahern operates cannot be allowed to stand.

fotoole@irish-times.ie