Dublin, Friday. The city is feeling squeamish. Weeks of talk about Alder Hey and organs and the perilous state of the State's blood bank have brought bodily functions on to the news agenda. In Cork, Limerick, Cahirciveen, Drogheda, Athenry, Portumna, Belmullet and beyond, people are slowing their blood donations too. In London, an Irish baby waits for an organ to save her from the death that took two of her siblings. Maybe she has one by now. Spare her if she doesn't.
Don't even mention needles. The thought makes grown men and women wince. All that rolling up your sleeve and having your soft spot swabbed, and then looking away while they pull red matter out from inside you and tell you to bend your arm - this is a primal heave.
Seen any politicians queuing up for photo opportunities at blood banks or showing off their organ donor cards? I haven't either. Like the rest of us, they may be feeling squeamish too. Bertie Ahern could be literally giving his lifeblood for Ireland but he ain't, so far as we know. Charlie McCreevy could be showing us how much he really cares, deep, deep down. If it measures how far stocks in social capital have fallen, then this reluctance to share body parts and body fluids is revealing. Blood is traditionally thicker than . . . and all that. To give it freely, you have to trust your investment bank.
Pleasure juices are a different matter. The rise of sexually transmitted diseases suggests we're more eager than ever to swap them. But on the span of other sharing, we're an increasingly alienated lot. The question is whether our decreasing trust indicates a lack of confidence in the system, or a lack of empathy with everyone else.
Fear of the needle comes a close second to fear of the knife - depending on why. The cosmetic surgery business is booming: eyelifts, nose jobs and breast implants are as common as cold cream for certain groups. People willingly go under the knife to get fat cut away from their stomachs, thighs and buttocks.
Do they as willingly go under it to give a child a kidney? You've got it. We give our organs to friends and relatives, reportedly, or when a case is heavily publicised. Otherwise we keep them to ourselves.
It's not all our fault. Between the Lindsay tribunal revelations and cases of the secret retention of the organs of dead children, never mind the Dublin-Cork rows about controlling testing and transfusion, you must conclude that some professionals and national agencies have broken trust. In a State where patients have no statutory rights, even while they are living, it was almost inevitable such outrages would happen.
We can take it as read that no pathologist here or in the UK will ever again remove organs from a dead body without explicit permission, apart altogether from the Minister for Health, Mr Martin's rather postscript announcement about new guidelines for autopsies.
But what happens with the living? The living still don't have statutory rights, or any legal assurance that their status and general health will be respected.
THE bridge between our bodies and us is still one that only the medical establishment is authorised to cross. We know instinctively that the territory rightly belongs to us, not them. Without assurances, we may be withdrawing our bodies in the only way we can.
I'm a bit of a fraud in this debate - I can't give blood for various reasons. I did donate placenta on a number of occasions, without being offered the courtesy of a request or a thanks. I didn't object, as the alternative of planting it in the garden and letting it feed the shrubs was a bit too real for me.
I have, however, signed more donor cards than I can remember. These flimsy little slips never negotiated the transition from satchel to handbag, or backpack to purse. They got crushed, or stuck to sweet wrappings, or lost.
There has to be a better way. My organs will get to someone who needs them in the event of my sudden death only if my family are contacted before the life support machine is switched off. I want my organs to stay useful. And if no one could use them, seeing as I've used them so well, then maybe my lifestyle can help some researcher understand better the effects of a late 20th century lifestyle on a woman who never made it past her prime.
An opt-out system of organ donation makes more sense than the opt-in one on which we rely currently. If the absolute worst happens and one of my children is suddenly killed, I want their organs to go to someone else without any delay. As things now stand, the medical staff would have the difficult task of asking me about donating my child's organs while I was reeling with shock and grief about their death. Not the best time to imagine it.
All this squeamishness, added to our understandable reluctance to think about the unthinkable, means donating any bit of us or our children is much more difficult than it need be. But we are adults; we know disease and death can strike anyone, any moment. Maybe now is the time to make the system more humane and amenable to doing what we know we really ought to do.
mruane@irish-times.ie