It should also, hopefully, have an important and lasting result which will be less apparent - it should write finis to the possibility of any future government department playing Blame the Victim when the State has failed in its duty. The fact that the Minister for Health and the Department of Health both repeatedly sought to blame the victims in this instance is arguably the key reason for their deep and abiding anger.
From the start, the victims were insulted by questions which implied that their sex lives or their involvement with drugs might have been factors in their infection. As time went on, this general intent to shift blame on to those damaged became more aggressive.
On the one hand, members of the Blood Transfusion Service Board management were given unconscionably large "golden handshakes" and allowed to slip into anonymity - although, as it turned out, that anonymity didn't last long. On the other hand, the attitude to the victims who had been poisoned by the State was: "Prove it". It has appeared that those responsible did not have to prove anything.
The State, having poisoned more than 1,000 of its own citizens, then set up a method of investigation. This was the Expert Group. While on the face of it, the State was now retreating from the "prove it" stance, this retreat was not a very committed one - as the finding of the famous file marked "Infective Hepatitis" proved.
Mr Noonan and Minister of State Mr Brian O'Shea both maintained in the Dail that the expert group knew Donor X had infective hepatitis. Mr Justice Finlay contradicts them:
"It is quite clear.. . that the existence of these particular documents and of the diagnosis of `infective hepatitis' written on them was not information which was available to the expert group."
Had the information on that file been available to and understood by the expert group, there can be no doubt that it would have changed its report significantly - and, as a result, would have short-circuited much of the legal and other miseries inflicted on the victims.
It should also be remembered that at the same time as the State was failing to acknowledge the file's significance, it was, ostensibly doing the right thing in providing counselling for those infected. But this was not done with any real empathy either.
In effect, the victims were offered counselling by the same people who had poisoned them. Brendan Howlin's defence of this was that the counselling had to be delivered by people "who knew something about" the issue.
"Bull", was how Niamh Cosgrave summed that one up on the Pat Kenny Show this week. Niamh, a mother of three who contracted hepatitis C from the anti-D blood products, went to the heart of the matter during her exchanges with Brendan Howlin.
"All you needed," she told him, "was a counsellor who knew how to deal with the trauma of life-threatening situations."
The continuing thread, running through the actions of the Department of Health and of the two successive ministers, is a dangerous and anti-democratic line of Establishment thinking. It assumes State institutions are innocent until proven guilty, and their victims guilty until proven otherwise. There can be no doubt that this thinking was behind Michael Noonan's crude attack on the legal teams of the victims.
THE real issue was this: an arm of the State, a body under Mr Noonan's aegis, had passed a grim and indeterminate sentence on hundreds of citizens, mostly women, robbing them of health and hope and vitality, confining them within an unrelenting lassitude and hampering some of them further with pain and complications.
Yet the Minister was less than generous in his approach. A small-time crook trying to get compo from the State would have been treated with more dignity.
Michael Noonan may have been quick to claim exoneration on the publication of Mr Justice Finlay's report, but the reality is that the hepatitis C scandal shows him, in sharp relief, to have been a man in determined retreat from his own potential for greatness.
Even now, there is a cynical cast to this Government's handling of the report which is a continuation of the pattern. Take, for example, the headline-grabbing announcement that the Government plans to send the report to the DPP. The message to the public is clear - the judge didn't send the report to the DPP but we have the courage to do so.
The fact is that sending the report to the DPP will not and cannot result in the prosecution of anybody. The DPP has no powers of investigation. The normal practice is that he can only prosecute on the basis of a book of evidence, and white the report might, by a long stretch of the imagination, be regarded as a book of evidence, it could not possibly result in the successful prosecution of anybody involved. It was a gesture and no more.
My understanding is that - if the DPP were so minded - he could hone down the report to a number of specific points and refer those to the Garda Commissioner for investigation. Why would the Government choose such a convoluted approach when it could have done what Fianna Fail has now done: referred the report directly to the Garda Commissioner, asking him to begin a criminal investigation?
AND other sensible steps might have been taken.
An indication from Michael Noonan that the decision to give generous golden handshakes to some in the blood board was a serious lapse of judgment would help. As would some indication that he is prepared to institute proceedings to recover that money.
Any such move would involve a quantum shift from the Minister's approach until now. We need to take a step away from the defensive approach of the State towards the victims to an approach guided by the principles of accountability, openness, compassion and care. It may be that this is a step too far for Mr Noonan.