A year ago last Wednesday, Karen Stephens became the first witness to appear before the Lindsay tribunal. She was the daughter of a Dublin haemophiliac who was infected with HIV through a contaminated blood product and died of AIDS in 1994.
Her evidence, and that of more than 40 other haemophiliacs and their next-of-kin, had been a long time coming. It took five years of campaigning by the Irish Haemophilia Society (IHS) to have the tribunal established. By the time the society had achieved its goal, over a third of the 220-plus haemophiliacs infected with HIV and/or hepatitis C had died.
Yet there was some satisfaction last May that the forgotten victims of one of the worst medical disasters in the history of the State were finally having their stories heard. There was much hope, too, that justice was at last being done.
A year on, and that initial optimism has been tempered somewhat. The IHS's legal team is in regular conflict with the tribunal's lawyers and its chairwoman. Disagreements over the interviewing and ordering of witnesses, the examination of patient records and access to confidential documentation have strained relations.
Particularly galling for the IHS has been the decision of the Irish Blood Transfusion Service - as the BTSB has become - not to waive privilege over its confidential records relating to the 1991 no-fault legal settlement with HIV-infected haemophiliacs.
The agency has no legal compulsion to release the documents but the IHS believes it has a moral one, especially after the Minister for Health, Mr Martin, decided to waive privilege over records in his control. The tribunal will return to this issue tomorrow.
Despite such clashes, however, progress is being made. New information is being uncovered. For a start, the tribunal has confirmed that not all haemophiliacs were infected with imported concentrates, as claimed by the BTSB for many years, but that Pelican House products were also responsible. It has revealed, moreover, that senior members of the board were aware of this fact from as early as 1986.
The tribunal has also uncovered evidence to suggest the BTSB failed to act on knowledge it had about the risk of HIV infection, that it ignored demands to heat-treat its products to guard against the virus, and that it continued to supply concentrates which it knew were unsafe.
In the second phase of the inquiry, examining look-back procedures, the tribunal has shown-up the board's failure to recall certain contaminated products and to contact some of those who were infected. But perhaps the most significant evidence has been heard during the third phase of the inquiry, investigating the response of the doctors.
Individual consultants have had to explain and justify some questionable treatment decisions. Failures have been admitted, notably in the area of communicating positive test results to patients and fellow professionals. Weaknesses in the medical system that persist today have been identified, and remedies suggested.
If all this is followed by relevant reforms, then the tribunal will have done a good job. But in order to fulfil its promise it must also complete a full examination of the issues involved.
Much depends on the tribunal's handling of two matters to come before it shortly. The first is an expected demand by the IHS to have all relevant previous government ministers give evidence. Only Fianna Fail's Dr Rory O'Hanlon and Labour's Mr Barry Desmond are listed as witnesses to date.
While their terms of office cover the most pertinent era from the tribunal's point of view, arguably they should be joined by other politicians such as Mr Charles Haughey, who as minister for health and Taoiseach oversaw cutbacks in services.
The second is a decision on whether to investigate the pharmaceutical companies which provided the BTSB with infected products. The IHS is due to seek the companies' attendance at the tribunal as well as access to documentation used in litigation against them in the US. The files are under the control of a Chicago judge who could be petitioned by tribunal lawyers to hand the records over.
If the IHS's demands are rejected, the tribunal could be accused of leaving the job half done. But broadening the scope of investigations has the potential to create an inquiry of beef tribunal proportions. Administrative and legal costs are already running close to £6 million, with £2.2 million allocated to the tribunal's legal team up to the end of last month and £1 million each to the lawyers of the Department of Health and the IHS.
A compromise of some sort is likely. And that will be hard to take for a community already feeling stung by compromises.