Paranoia: the only sane response to years of hypocrisy for haemophiliacs

Eleven years ago this month, the then Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, flew back into Dublin Airport from a trip to Japan. While he was in Tokyo, he had come across one of the more exotic aspects of eastern culture, the pending resignation, in the face of a financial corruption scandal, of his counterpart, Nabaru Takeshita.

Such things, of course, could never happen in Ireland.

Charles Haughey did nevertheless have some political worries on his mind. His minority Fianna Fail administration was facing defeat in the Dail on a private member's motion put down by Brendan Howlin.

This pesky affair concerned an electorally insignificant group of people, haemophiliacs who had contracted HIV from blood products supplied by the State. The bothersome motion called on Haughey's government to put up all of £400,000 to form a trust fund to help these sick and desperate citizens.

The Fianna Fail leader made it clear that he would not stand for this kind of nonsense. In front of members of the opposition, who subsequently claimed never to have witnessed so vehement an attack, he launched a verbal onslaught on his senior colleagues for failing to prevent this ridiculous embarrassment. Although his followers loyally obeyed his orders to vote against the haemophiliacs, the motion was carried by 72 votes to 69.

Haughey was so outraged that he decided to call a general election. The defeat that followed marked the beginning of the end of his extraordinary political career.

This week the plight of the haemophiliacs again shared the headlines with the rise and fall of Charles Haughey.

While the Irish Haemophilia Society was demanding assurances that it would be paid its full costs in the forthcoming tribunal of inquiry into their infection, Charles Haughey was agreeing to pay £1 million to the Revenue Commissioners. While these two stories may seem to be tied together by nothing more than a coincidence of timing, they are in fact intimately connected.

It is not hard to imagine the feelings of haemophiliacs and their families as the reality of Ireland in 1989 is gradually revealed by the McCracken, Moriarty and Flood tribunals. There is a grotesque gap between the hard-faced meanness of a Taoiseach prepared to call a general election rather than release £400,000 to help them and the extraordinary generosity shown at the same time to that same Taoiseach and his senior colleagues.

The haemophiliacs now know, for example, that in the same week that Charles Haughey was facing them down, his bag-man, Des Traynor, approached Ben Dunne's accountant, Noel Fox, and asked for £150,000 sterling to top up previous gifts from the same source of almost £600,000 sterling.

By a coincidence so gruesome that it would be unacceptable in a work of fiction, the chairman of the Blood Transfusion Service Board, the agency that supplied the haemophiliacs with the infected blood products, was none other than the same Noel Fox.

They will also be aware of the huge contrast between their treatment by Haughey in 1989 and his very different attitude to another citizen with a life-threatening illness, Brian Lenihan.

Just a week after he was so angered by the idea of a trust fund to pay the medical expenses of haemophiliacs, Haughey called the then chief executive of the VHI, Tom Ryan, into his office and let it be known that the State health insurance agency should cough up £57,000 for an operation for Mr Lenihan.

Shortly after that, in the space of just two months, Fianna Fail collected £200,000 - half of what was intended for the entire haemophiliac community - from business leaders to pay for Mr Lenihan's medical expenses. Most of that money is yet to be accounted for.

The haemophiliacs know, too, that the general election called to show them the virtues of fiscal rectitude was bonanza time for two of Haughey's senior colleagues. In the weeks after they voted against the trust fund, Ray Burke lodged £107,000 to his bank account (at least £60,000 of it from JMSE and a company associated with Tony O'Reilly) and Padraig Flynn received £50,000 from the property developer Tom Gilmartin.

Between them, Haughey, Burke and Flynn received more money in personal donations in the run-up to that election than the trust fund voted for by the Dail would have given the haemophiliacs.

Is it any wonder, then, that the Irish Haemophilia Society remains deeply suspicious of the State and the political system? The hurt, anger and mistrust so evident in the society's public clashes with the Minister for Health, Micheal Martin, this week are rooted in extraordinarily bitter experience.

A group already severely disadvantaged by a dangerous and debilitating affliction was given hope in the early 1980s by the arrival of the blood-clotting product, Factor 8. This lifeline turned into a lash when the BTSB supplied them with Factor 8 that was infected with HIV. By the time the State finally agreed a compensation package in 1991, many of the victims were already dead.

If such an appalling tragedy could possibly be made any worse, the knowledge of the monumental hypocrisy of a Taoiseach who was so crassly indifferent to their plight can only deepen its impact. If it seems unfair that Micheal Martin, whose efforts to smooth the society's concerns about tribunal costs seem entirely sincere, should be bearing the brunt of this anger, the word "unfair" loses meaning in the face of what has happened to the haemophiliacs.

At one level, perhaps, the society's threat to pull out of the tribunal it fought so hard to establish unless it is given absolute guarantees about costs is hard to understand. It is almost impossible to imagine any circumstances in which the society would not be granted its costs by the tribunal, and it is not easy to see why its lawyers cannot work on that basis.

At another level, though, it is all to easy to understand the society's behaviour. From the outside, it may make sense for the haemophiliacs to trust the good intentions of State institutions which seem genuinely committed to uncovering the truth.

From the inside, it must be dreadfully hard to trust a State that has poisoned, neglected and mocked you. When the chairman of the agency that gave you deadly blood products is also the conduit for money given to the Taoiseach who treated you with such contempt, paranoia is a perfectly sane response.

In this, as in countless other ways, the poisonous legacy of Charles Haughey's hypocrisy is still running through the veins of Irish public life. It will take much more than a £1 million tax settlement to buy it off.

fotoole@irish-times.ie