Connect: 'THE man died a very cruel death. You would not let an animal die the way this man died," said Phyllis Hughes, sister of the late Patrick Joseph Walsh who died eight days ago in Monaghan Hospital.
Hughes, who had travelled from the US to visit her brother, added that her nephew "saw his father die with blood running out of his mouth".
How would you feel if it had happened to your father or brother? Forget rules and protocols - medical, political, bureaucratic. Just consider how you might feel. There can be no certainty, of course, that surgery would have saved Walsh. Yet informed accounts suggest the procedure required was likely to be, for skilled hands, relatively uncomplicated.
The case highlights a clash between law and ethics. Such clashes form the themes of countless yarns in which spirited individuals disobey their bosses to save the day. The kind of crisis involved is set up in innumerable films: usually a detective is ordered off a case but persists in a career-threatening, indeed frequently life-threatening, private capacity to crack it.
It needn't be a cop who's at the centre of the drama. Such clashes can be spun around doctors, journalists, teachers, lawyers and scientists. Indeed any worker can be used for these morality tales. The fact that so many are mawkish, cynically designed to flog Hollywood "individuality" to "identifying" audiences is another story of propaganda, gullibility and exploitation.
The key point is that law and ethics regularly clash. In the case of Walsh, the rule that Monaghan General Hospital not conduct surgery after 5pm surely clashed with the Hippocratic Oath, popularly believed to underpin a doctor's sense of duty. Many doctors consider the original oath to be redundant - Hippocrates, after all, was born almost 500 years before Christ - but its spirit is not.
In essence, the Hippocratic Oath, disregarding its classical and modern wordings, can be reduced to: "May I care for others as I would have them care for me." Clearly, such adapted sentiment is classically Christian in so far as the gospel credits Jesus Christ with preaching the fundamental advice to "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you".
But the law sometimes prevents people from behaving in what they might consider a just manner. It's not only in mawkish Hollywood films that individuals are confronted with the choice of breaking the law or following their ethical promptings.
Certainly, breaking the law should be a last resort, chosen only after all alternatives have been exhausted. But it must be countenanced.
There is, of course, the possibility that in disobeying the rules a doctor could be risking professional and financial ruin. That is not a step to be taken lightly. But sometimes people arguably have duties that transcend the rules even when the penalty for breaking those rules can be considered unconscionably severe or draconian.
Still, it is one thing to consider ethics in the abstract. It is another to be faced with a situation in which applying principles - no matter how thought through - becomes a reality. Without doubt however, the relentless "lawyerisation" of Irish life, in which the law increasingly permeates more and more areas, has been a very mixed blessing.
It has long been said of Irish journalism, for instance, that ethics don't count because most journalists are so concerned with avoiding the strictures of the law that ethics are viewed as a largely irrelevant luxury. After the seemingly needless death of Patrick Joseph Walsh can we now say the same about medicine? Is medicine not too dominated by legal considerations?
Certainly, doctors will tell you it is and that it has been for years. Lawyers, on the other hand, who get handsomely paid for their vigilance, will claim that without sufficiently stringent laws, medical negligence could go unpunished. That might be, but there's no doubt that doctors' fear of the law has changed the doctor-patient relationship and not always, albeit sometimes, for the better.
The prevailing relationship between doctors and lawyers adds to a lack of trust throughout society. Whether it is a cause or a result of a general erosion of trust can be debated but it is certainly pivotal. Mary Harney's concern that "community values" - dependent on trust! - are under pressure is absurd seeing as PD policies - rules, rules, rules - contribute hugely to making it so.
It's ironic that earlier this week Michael McDowell triumphantly announced the formation of a new body to stamp out unscrupulous practices by estate agents and auctioneers. It will, as Orna Mulcahy, the property editor of The Irish Times, wrote on Wednesday, simply mean "business as usual" because the market not the punters will be protected by it.
The truth is that the more law is enacted, the less ethics are considered. Sure, ultimately everybody has feet of clay but it really is far better that people be encouraged to do the decent thing for its own sake rather than threatening them with rafts of legislation, sanctions and penalties. Patrick Joseph Walsh would almost certainly be alive in a more humane and trusting society.