GIVE ME A BREAK:I DON'T KNOW about you, but I have always liked Jade Goody. When the British tabloids turned her into the witch of political incorrectness and chavism, I felt sorry for her because she was only being honest.

I agreed that calling people “pakis” was wrong and that Jade lacked diplomacy, but beneath the surface there was always a girl who wanted to live life to the full with the minimum of intellectual resources.

She has always displayed immaturity, but like a lot of us she always meant well. She made silly comments and insulted people but she never meant to cause offence. Jade always believed that she was a good person because she was always fighting just to be Jade, a struggle that privileged people can’t understand.

My view of Jade was that she had to make triple the effort in order to have an identity that mattered. I suspect that fairly early in her life, she realised that becoming significant would take determination. And when her struggle was noticed by people who could translate it into money, she allowed herself to be exploited.

You have to have had a difficult upbringing with absent parents or very need parents to understand Jade. In the interests of her children, Jade, now aged 27, will eek every cent out of her story of her fight with the disease so that she can leave them a trust fund. What parent can’t identify with that?

Jade has lived her life by the media, and now her illness is being played out in the media. I wish I could say that it breaks my heart, but I don’t know her as a friend, so it would be dishonest for me to say that her potentially terminal illness matters so me.

And yet it does matter to me. One reason it matters is that she has cervical cancer. Last week Jade revealed that the cancer has spread with frightening speed. This is a cancer which can be contracted by a sexually transmitted virus and which can be prevented with a vaccine. It really makes me angry that the Irish Government has decided not to give our daughters the cervical cancer vaccine free. Maybe if Jade had had the vaccine before she became sexually active, she might not have got the disease.

Getting the cervical cancer vaccine has become something of a status symbol where I live. I could, but I won’t, tell you the names of girls whose parents could afford the €600 vaccine. There are even teenage girls asking their parents why they can’t have it when everyone else is getting it.

This is a real story that matters. When everyone is talking about the R-word and the downturn and repossession and shares being worth 20 per cent of what they were a few months ago, this is an essential health issue.

Parents who can afford the vaccine are paying for it because they will not risk seeing their daughters possibly die in their 20s and 30s of cervical cancer.

This is a basic inequality. Our current Government has decided that vaccinating girls against cervical cancer is not economically effective. From a health resources point of view, is the cost of the vaccine more than the cost of treating cervical cancer? Is that how health economists think?

And is it also, ironically, the way that those making money out of Jade Goody think?

Her cancer is worth a lot of money when it means going bald in public and being photographed greeting your lover who has been granted early release from his prison sentence.

But that’s our world now, isn’t it? One woman’s very serious illness is worth more than a thousand women living. Media lives that can be sold are worth a thousand times more than real lives. The film of Jade’s life is probably in the works as I write.

Her hubris makes her our Anna Karenina – our Daisy Miller. With a life like Jade’s to watch, who needs to read novels at all? The tabloids moralise (in their not so subtle ways) that a young, ambitious woman is being “punished” (as some have claimed) by cancer. I refuse to accept that Jade is only getting what she deserved.

I don’t know what message Jade plans to send out. I imagine that all she wants is to make sure her children thrive when she’s gone. Jade’s story should be a reminder that we should campaign for the cervical cancer vaccine to be given free of charge to all girls and young women in Ireland.