Virus of secrecy still assails the body politic

HOW can it happen that one of the most experienced and able of Irish politicians says something as dumbfoundingly stupid as Michael Noonan said about the late Mrs Brigid McCole on Wednesday?

What grotesquely distorted logic is at work when, faced with an appalling wrong done to an innocent woman and her family by the State, the man charged with protecting the health of Irish citizens can manage only to blame that woman for trying to vindicate her rights through the courts?

How could Michael Noonan have said on RTE radio on Monday that he didn't know that Mrs McCole was likely to die when that information `was given by her consultant in a sworn affidavit opened in the High Court in a case in which he was a defendant?

How can an intelligent and humane man write down and read out words which imply that Mrs McCole's problem was that she was too sick and that, really, her lawyers ought to have found someone healthier to take the case? What did he think the point of her case was - that she was feeling pretty well but just felt like a few days in court?

The nearest we can get to an answer to such questions is this: that the forces that have distorted Irish democracy so badly over the past 10 years are still at work. There is a sickness in the system which this Government promised to cure but which still rages, producing every so often fevers of political delusion.

There is something almost uncannily appropriate, indeed, about the coincidence this week of Albert Reynolds's libel action against the Sunday Times in London and the establishment of a tribunal of inquiry into the hepatitis C scandal in Dublin. For events in these two cities tell a single tale.

In one, the reasons for the present Government's existence - the fall of the Reynolds/Spring coalition - are being rehearsed. In the other, the failure of the Government to justify that existence by creating a democracy in which the events of November 1994 would be unthinkable is being amply demonstrated by the very need to set up a judicial inquiry.

THE present Coalition is in power because, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the institutions of Irish democracy had started to fall apart. The beef tribunal had exposed not merely a dreadful series of political and administrative failures, but also the impotence - even irrelevance - of the Dail. The State itself had consistently placed the interests of private companies and of its own apparatus ahead of the interests of its citizens.

Even more extraordinarily, it had developed a conscious theoretical justification for this, arguing before the beef tribunal that the State did not represent the public interest, that it had interests of its own that could be separate from, and even opposed to, those of its citizens.

That idea was not merely argued explicitly, it was also implicit in a whole series of actions, from the undermining of the tribunal by the imposition of absolute cabinet confidentiality to the hijacking of its report by one political party for its own ends. This called into question many of the most basic assumptions of our system of government. Who owns the State? Whom does it serve? Can a democratic state have interests of its own, separate from the interests of its citizens?

That these questions still have to be asked in relation to the whole hepatitis C scandal and to Michael Noonan's crass insensitivity to its realities is a measure of the failure of this Government to do its most basic job. It came into office because the democratic legitimacy of the State had been undermined. But it has yet to fulfil its promise to give it more stable foundations.

Who would have believed at the time of Albert Reynolds's dramatic fall that, nearly two years after the present Government came to power, it would have done so little to reform Irish democracy? That the promised referendum on cabinet confidentiality would have been shelved, almost certainly for good? That a Freedom of Information Bill would not yet be before the Oireachtas?

That John Bruton, one of the most consistent supporters of parliamentary reform, would have resorted, as he did in the second instalment of the Brendan Smyth affair, to the explanation that important facts were withheld from the Dail because the right questions were not asked? That Dail committees would still not have the power to make witnesses attend? That it would be necessary to establish a judicial inquiry simply to get at facts that are already known to public bodies?

In human terms, the hepatitis C scandal is about wrecked lives and the infliction of entirely avoidable harm on thousands of men, women and children. But in political terms, it is about the persistence long after the fall of Albert Reynolds of the political culture that led to his demise. In dealing with the consequences of the scandal, the Government faced a clear choice.

Was it going to give absolute priority to the rights of citizens? Or was it going to look first to the short term interests of State institutions - the BTSB which had created the scandal, the Department of Health which had failed either to stop it or to bring out the full truth of what had happened, and the Exchequer, which would pay out damages to the injured women?

TO anyone who had sat through the first half of the 1990s and watched what happened when a State forgot that its power came from the people, there should have been no real choice at all.

The absolute duty of any democratic state is to protect its citizens, in this case both the families directly affected and the wider public that needs to be able to trust the public health services. Everything else - the reputation of a minister or his department, the sensitivities of public employees, the need to keep a tight rein on public expenditure - has to be subordinated to this overriding consideration.

If that had happened, there would have been a stark contrast between the bad old days in which a culture of secrecy had its inevitable consequences of ineptitude and maladministration and the new era of John Bruton's "government behind a pane of glass". Michael Noonan's apparent belief that it was his job as a representative of the people to attack a citizen for seeking to right a wrong through the courts would have been impossible.

Instead of contrast, however, we got continuity. We got the next chapter of the same old story. Public information was treated as private property. The apparatus of the law was used to intimidate awkward customers. The Minister for Health allowed himself to become, before the courts, not the champion of sick women, but the defender of State institutions against them. State versus People looked like becoming a permanent fixture.

The forthcoming public inquiry may be part of the antidote to the lethal dose of arrogance and ineptitude that remains in the bloodstream of Irish democracy. But the malaise goes deep, and unless it acts quickly to make the reforms that it knew two years ago to be urgently required, this Government, too, will be carried off by the sickness.