It is a strange thing, in the so-called "silly season", to be thinking of defensiveness, guilt, blame and loss. It is even stranger to find oneself reading an old, yellowed Pelican Sociology and Anthropology paperback instead of an unputdownable lump of escapist trash with a gaudy cover to match.
The paperback is one of those odd remnants of moving house. When you move to a new home, 90 per cent of your property gets unpacked and put in its appropriate place in the house within a couple of weeks. However, there are always a few cartons that get shoved under stairs or into utility rooms to be opened later - much later.
The time-managers would probably hold that if you've managed to do without the items in a carton for more than a year, you should throw them out but there's that nagging feeling that something vital is in that carton, something forgotten.
So it was that I found myself sitting on the floor the other day slitting open a carton and finding it full of paperbacks I had meant to throw out long ago. As I turned them over, one of them startled me with its cover of a blood transfusion unit hanging on an intravenous injection pole. The book was called The Gift Relationship, which I had bought as a young teacher when it first appeared in 1970.
I paged through it trying to recall why I had bought it. Maybe because it looked educational. Maybe because it was very cheap or maybe because I had become a blood donor in July 1971.
The book is by a professor who compares the US system of blood donation with the British system. I remember being horrified by the lack of standards implicit in the buying of blood across the Atlantic at the time.
"It has been repeatedly shown in the United States that the official public health standards designed to insure the continued safety, purity and potency of biological products are only minimal and in many cases are either inapplicable, inadequate or ineffective," reads one page.
"Under the standards set by the National Institutes of Health, an ancient physician, a nurse and a former bartender can theoretically combine their resources to form a blood bank. They can draw most of their blood from Skid Row donors . . ."
At the time, I would have thought "there but for the grace of God or the Department of Health or both, go we".
Had I, 15 years later, been appointed as Minister for Health, the sense that the altruism-based donor system operated by Ireland was secure, safe and operating to the highest standards might well have contributed to a feeling that, whatever else I had to deal with in the health care area, I could sleep easy, sure that the blood bank was, like Caesar's wife, above suspicion.
How times have changed. Now, any Minister with direct or remote-control responsibility for any State-sponsored body or public interest agency, would be well advised to err on the side of paranoia. It is safer for the nation if a Minister takes an interrogative stance vis-a-vis his or her reporting agencies. Caesar's wife had better have her books in order and her operating standards ready for inspection.
Not only has the presumption of innocence been removed from State-sponsored bodies (unjustly, in more cases) but a sceptical stance is now the preferred option for Ministers, from the point of view of the public.
A few years ago, when I did a blunt intervention in Aer Lingus' affairs as Minister for Tourism, Transport and Communication, the description of me as "handbagging in a State agency" was widely seen as acceptable, albeit somewhat sexist.
It is significant that both Mary O'Rourke and Jim McDaid have intervened to an arguably greater extent in the affairs of State bodies reporting to them in recent weeks, without anything like the bad press. There is a very real sense - first manifest in the approval ratings for Michael Lowry in his early days as Don Quixote tilting against so called "golden circles" - that the public's faith in State-sponsored bodies has taken a knocking and that Ministers are now required to serve an active quality control function.
I have mixed feelings about all of this. First of all, I have a great sense of loss and of almost personal betrayal over the Blood Transfusion Board. This was an organisation trusted to do a vital job and valued for doing it. There are some assurances every citizen should have and clean blood is one of them. The failure to live up to that trust delivers much the same kick to one's confidence in the secular institutions as Father Brendan Smyth's perverse behaviour has delivered to many people's confidence in the clergy - and is as unfair to the good guys in both situations.
But the answer is not to put politicians in a role as ultimate quality control inspector or auditor. State-sponsored bodies have boards. The practice indulged in by all political parties and all governments of stuffing such boards with party faithful as a public vote of thanks has been criticised often.
VERY often, when making up board memberships within my own areas of responsibility, I picked someone before knowing about their politics, if any, and then checked up only to protect the administration, of which I was part, against looking foolish.
It is political myopia pretending to be 20/20 vision to put together boards made up of people whose only qualification is long service to a particular party. And before any of the eminent people on any of our State boards get furious, let me be absolutely clear.
There are, people on the boards of State-sponsored bodies who are apolitical, highly-qualified and completely committed to the work of the body. There are many people on these boards who have a strong political connection but who are also highly-qualified and completely committed.
It may in the past have been a functional system but the system of appointments is past its sell-by date given the scale and complexity of the operations now undertaken by some of our State-sponsored bodies. If we do not persuade the best brains in the country to serve on State boards, then we will neither have the strategic, disinterested policy-making our State-sponsored bodies require, nor the checks and balances on executive action which a really good board provides.
None of which, of course, can prevent the development of situations in which the Minister must intervene, and put himself or herself at personal risk in the process. In the last couple of weeks, Michael Noonan's interventions, or in the case of the threatening letter to Mrs McCole, his non-interventions, have been much castigated.
Having to some extent led the action in the Dail against him on the hepatitis C issue, I should be delighted, not troubled, by the revelations of the last week.
Instead, I would wish that good men and women, when they get their portfolios as Ministers in the future, are given a mission by their leader that they should never sacrifice a sick individual to a notional "common good", never protect the system against the citizens, never damp down their humanity in the interests of an institution.