LAST October, a few days after Brigid McCole died, her family wrote to the Minister for Health, Michael Noonan. They asked him five questions. Four of them - about the behaviour of the Blood Transfusion Service Board between 1977 and 1991 - have been answered by Mr Justice Finlay's tribunal of inquiry. The tribunal judged that the fifth question was outside its terms of reference and did not deal with it.
This unanswered question is about the behaviour of the State. The defendants in Mrs McCole's legal action - the Minister for Health, the BTSB, the National Drugs Advisory Board and the Attorney General - had, a few weeks earlier, finally agreed to admit liability and to apologise for the terrible wrong done to her, but they had insisted that there was "no justification" for her claim for aggravated damages. They had also threatened her that if she continued her action against the State, or if she continued to claim aggravated damages, then the State would pursue her for full legal costs.
The fifth question that the McCole family asked Michael Noonan was: "What was the justification for this threat?" It is at once an intensely private and an extensively public question.
A traumatised family needed to know why their government had treated their mother as an Enemy of the People and an unsettled democracy needed to know who exactly had come to the conclusion that the collective will of Irish citizens as a whole was that threats should be issued on their behalf to a dying and grossly abused woman.
No clear response to this question has ever been made by Michael Noonan, but the impression he has given is that the BTSB was conducting its own legal defence in the McCole case, separate from that of his Department, and that neither he nor the Government were responsible for the threats.
On October 3rd, 1996, a fortnight after the threatening letter went to Mrs McCole, Michael Noonan told the Dail that while he had been informed of the BTSB's conduct of its defence, "I was not asked for my permission. I was not asked to make a policy decision. Whether deputies like it or not, the BTSB is a separate legal entity . .. It would be totally improper of me to try to give a direction on the matter."
Last Tuesday, however, Michael Noonan's Cabinet colleague Brendan Howlin seemed to suggest something very different. On Liveline on RTE Radio 1, Marian Finucane asked him the McColes' fifth question: "Why was the BTSB allowed to make legal threats to the McCole family when it was known the BTSB had no legal defence?"
Brendan Howlin said: "Well, the legal strategy was decided by the Government, and I think that's a question that needs to be answered ... The fifth question as I said was handled by Government in relation to the advice that was given and the strategies that were taken by the Government. I've said publicly on television last week that maybe we took too much legal advice as a government."
The interview continued as follows:
Q: In other words, when you say it was the Government, are you saying that you as Minister took the decision?
A: Well, I wasn't Minister at the time.
Q: Well indeed - the Government took the decision.
A: The Government is collectively responsible for Government strategy in all these matters and advice comes through the Minister at the time and the Government made the decision in relation to how these things happen ... Now, I now see that didn't suit the McCole family and they were right to go the course that they went.
ON ANY ordinary understanding of the English language, what Brendan Howlin was saying to Marian Finucane and her listeners was that the BTSB's threats to Mrs McCole were part of a legal strategy decided by the Cabinet, on the recommendation of the Minister for Health, Michael Noonan, who was himself acting on the advice of his own lawyers.
His recollection could, of course, be mistaken, but he had a special interest in the hepatitis scandal as the Minister responsible for dealing with it in its initial stages. Considering his own statement to the tribunal that he regarded this scandal as "one of the gravest issues that has arisen in recent times", it would be very surprising if his memory of such a recent and important aspect of it was not accurate.
The problem, though, is that his repeated indications that the BTSB's threats to Mrs McCole arose from a legal strategy decided by the Government as a whole is hard to reconcile with Michael Noonan's statement to the Dail that he was not asked for a policy decision and that the BTSB's legal defence was its own affair. The Government's answer to a question posed five months ago by a bereaved family is, to put it very mildly indeed, confused and inadequate.
If Brendan Howlin's version of events is correct, the question not merely has not been answered, but cannot be answered. If the justification for the threats to Mrs McCole was set out in Cabinet discussions, it is, according to a constitutional ruling of the Supreme Court, absolutely confidential. It is nobody's business - not Mrs McCole's husband and children, not the 1,600 other victims on whose behalf she was taking her case, not the Dail, not the wider public whose confidence in the blood supply has been so desperately shaken.
Actions were taken on our behalf but we have no right to know who thought they were a good idea and why.
This is in itself logical enough. At the heart of the decision to bully Mrs McCole was the notion that the institutions of the State have interests of their own, above and beyond the interests of the society they are supposed to serve. That distinction between the interests of the State and the public interest was argued in theory by the then government before the beef tribunal. In Mrs McCole's case, it was a given a vivid and grotesque application in the issuing of threats by State institutions to an injured citizen.
In a functioning democracy, the word "versus" in the title "Brigid Ellen McCole versus the Minister for Health" would have no conceivable meaning, but in the distorted democracy which this Government inherited and has yet to put to rights, it makes perfect sense.
No amount of information, no frank replies to unanswered questions, can restore Brigid McCole to her family or wash the virus from the victims' bloodstreams, but the awful lesson of what happened to those victims - that unaccountable institutions are deadly - can, and must, be learned by the political system.
Until it has been learned well enough for the Government to give a clear account of itself and a straight answer to the McCole family's fifth question, that system will not be on the road to recovery.