Last Friday night it emerged almost casually that the State is to give £60 million to the Gaelic Athletic Association in return for its agreement to play a few matches in the Taoiseach's personal vanity project, Sports Campus Ireland. By Sunday, RTE's well-informed GAA correspondent was reporting that the real figure was twice as much. While logic would suggest that sporting organisations should be paying for the use of a stadium, the Bertie Bowl turns logic on its head. The GAA and the Football Association of Ireland are now to receive something like £200 million to play perhaps half a dozen games a year on Bertie's pitch. In a sane society, it might be asked whether a stadium that you have to pay people to play in is a priority for public funds. Instead it has become clear that rather than admit his fantasy project should be scaled back, the Taoiseach will throw almost any amount of money at it.
Meanwhile, back in the Four Courts, the same Taoiseach has his lawyers battling to take a few thousand pounds off Kathryn Sinnott, mother of the young autistic man Jamie. He wants the damages awarded by the High Court to Kathryn, for the State's failure to educate Jamie according to his needs, to be rescinded. He also wants the principle that an appropriate education is a human right to be demolished.
One thing is certain: this is not about money. The bizarre events of the weekend show that when Bertie and Charlie McCreevy and Mary Harney decide that something is important, money is no object. For a fraction of what the Bertie Bowl will cost (about £1 billion, all told), every autistic child in the State could be given an appropriate education.
So what is it all about? Why is the Government making legal war on these vulnerable citizens and their carers? Unusually for this Government, it's about a point of principle. This Government wants to make it clear that citizens don't have rights as human beings. They have only such rights as the Government, in its wisdom, decides to give them. In the last few days, I have read the State's written submissions to the Supreme Court. They are extraordinary documents that should be read by anyone who has the vaguest illusion that we live in a republican democracy. For behind the careful legalese, they say two staggering things explicitly. This is not a democracy founded on human rights. And the State should not be penalised for breaches of constitutional rights.
For all the difficulties created by the Catholic nature of the State, there is one great democratic inheritance from that tradition. The Catholic tradition of so-called natural law holds that human beings have rights because they are human, not because some court or king or parliament grants them those rights. The best of Catholic thinking in Ireland, and the great Fianna Fail contribution to Irish jurisprudence, comes from that tradition.
BURIED in the State's submissions in the Sinnott appeal is a simple, unceremonious rejection of that moral and intellectual heritage. It's there in black-and-white: "The natural law, Christian and democratic nature of the State doctrine is inappropriate as a means to interpret the Constitution." In other words, neither democracy nor human rights is fundamental to the nature of the State. Developing from this mind-blowing contention is the logical corollary: the State can't be held accountable for breaches of the human rights of citizens.
The passage in which this is expressed most clearly is an approving quotation from a previous judgment made in a different context by Mr Justice Henchy: "No matter how unfounded in law certain conduct may have been, no matter how unwarranted its operation in a particular case, what has happened has happened and cannot, or should not, be undone."
In the Sinnott case, this means that the State's past refusal to give Jamie his basic right to an education is water under the bridge. Jamie and Kathryn should just grin and bear it. In the wider context, it means that whatever the State does to you, however unlawfully it behaves, you have no right to damages. Think about this, read that quotation again, and remember that this is what the Government is arguing in 2001, after the Belfast Agreement, after the UN Convention on Human Rights, after nearly eight decades of life in what is supposed to be a republican democracy.
It might be argued that these alarming arguments are merely part of a legal game in which lawyers have to find some way to support a difficult case. Comforting as this notion might be, it is wrong.
The State, as the events of the weekend show, can easily afford to give Jamie Sinnott and every other citizen with autism the education they need. As ministers have insisted, the point of appealing the High Court judgment is to establish points of principle about the operation of law in Ireland. They have chosen to take a hit in public opinion to establish once and for all that human rights and democracy are not the primary basis on which this State should operate. When they have gone to so much trouble to make a point, we should listen very carefully to what they are saying.
fotoole@irish-times.ie