Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Hepatitis C Scandal, by Glenys Spray, Wolfhound 144pp, £6.99
First, a confession: in 1994, some months after the Blood Transfusion Service Board revealed that some of its customers had been infected with Hepatitis C by using its products, a freelance journalist, Patricia Hegarty, now with the BBC, tried to get me to take an interest in the story. Everyone had been given the impression that everything was now all right but, she argued, everything was not all right. The women concerned felt they were being treated badly and that the full story had not come out. I did nothing about it. Here, I thought, was a bunch of people who wanted the world to dance attendance on them because of something that had been dealt with adequately just as soon at the BTSB found out about it. They would do a great deal better to stop their whinging and get on with their lives. As we now know, Hegarty was right and I, in my lazy assumptions, was wrong. This matters because, in reading Glenys Spray's excellent book, I was struck by two things: the tendency, not just of myself but of other people, to dismiss the importance of what was going on; and the depth of the suffering of those afflicted by Hepatitis C.
The importance of the threat seems to have been dismissed or, at best, ignored, on various occasions over many years within the BTSB itself. Civil servants and politicians too seem to have, at various times, dismissed the right of those affected to know everything that there was to know and to be treated with frankness and fairness.
The death of Mrs Brigid McCole in 1996, following an exhausting battle with the BTSB and the Department of Health, may have been the first event to give the general public an inkling of the suffering which Hepatitis C brought to many of those who were infected by it. Ms Spray brings us many examples of the effects on a range of people: people who were outgoing, sociable, the life and soul of the party and who are now fatigued and sick; people whose families were critical of them because they appeared lazy and feckless but who were debilitated by an illness none of them knew about; people who fight an agonising battle daily against the exhaustion of the illness because they feel they must conceal it from others - and what a heroic effort that must take. And apart from those infected there are the families, spouses and children, whose relationship with a loved one was irrevocably changed by this scourge.
In the light of all this, it is remarkable that Jane O'Brien and her comrades in Positive Action were able to take the Establishment by the throat and shake it until the truth fell out. After all, the politicians and the BTSB should have got away with it: these were powerful forces lined up against people who were sick and scared. Yet Positive Action fought their way through against the odds, got the truth out and got a decent compensation scheme (though £1 million would not be compensation enough for what was done to those infected with Hepatitis C).
In the course of their campaign they revealed that those who are supposed to act on our behalf - politicians and civil servants - are willing to fight us tooth and nail when it comes to protecting their bailiwick. Glenys Spray tells the story well. Her book is readable without being sensational - and having read it, you will never see the State and its various arms in the same light again.
Padraig O'Morain is Social Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times