You - like Kevin Myers - probably wonder sometimes about the flood of medical litigation cases before our courts. Cerebral palsy, for example, is apparently no longer a natural condition which occasionally strikes the unlucky individual, and the unlucky family.
To judge from the many recent settlements, involving many millions of euro, even though they seem actually to involve no admission of negligence, there is in effect a tacit acceptance that something went wrong during delivery.
Is this so? Who can say? Indeed, who can even begin to unthread the utter calamity that these cases represent for their families? But since the legal profession has no trouble venturing into these matters, should we not wonder about what they're doing there, and how they're doing it? Merely because this is a sensitive area should not bar us from making enquiry, though no doubt lawyers would prefer we didn't.
There are two issues here. One is the rightness of damages being awarded for something which might actually be a natural event, outside the control of mortal man or woman. The other is the residue of those damages after, say, the death of the person who has been awarded them. This applies universally in all damages suits, but is tragically true for children with cerebral palsy who cannot be expected to live a normal lifespan, yet for whom damages are often agreed as if they will. And then if they don't, their heirs can inherit staggering amounts of money. Surely, if these things are a proper matter for the courts, awards should be in the form of annuities, instead of capital sums which enrich percentage-charging lawyers and, in the event of death, permanently and hugely enrich the next of kin.
But when one reads of the case of Anne Mulligan of Lucan, and her 22-year-old son, Robert, one can see how the parents of children afflicted by cerebral palsy are almost obliged to sue someone or other, or a living, unassisted hell awaits them. Robert suffers from severe dyskynetic cerebral palsy, with little control over movement. His spine is severely twisted sideways, he suffers from Gilbert's syndrome, and is being cared for at home, where his mother has to wash, change and feed him several times a day and night.
She has now begun High Court proceedings to direct the Minister for Health and the South Western Area Health Board to provide 24-hour-care for her son.
I find this case both astounding and appalling, not least because it shows how little I know, for I had assumed such assistance as she now seeks was provided as a matter of course. I make no comment on the legal merits of Anne's case: but what sort of country is this that a woman who has been so visited by such calamitous unfairness does not, as a matter of legal right, automatically get all the State aid she wants and needs? Is it not perfectly grotesque that anyone so encumbered should have to sue for assistance because the State has never bothered to create the legal and financial instruments to lift the burden from shoulders such as hers?
Robert was born in that distant day, before the locusts arrived from the Incorporated Law Society, and we had begun to out-sue the entire world, and when natural accidents were believed to cause cerebral palsy, and were regarded as one of the perinatal perils of life. So even though we were aware that some children are born with massive loss of co-ordination, verging at times on total paralysis, we took no steps to ensure the burden of this life was shared financially by the greater community.
Instead, the people of Ireland - who not long after Robert was born, triumphantly affirmed the right to life of the unborn - have repeatedly elected governments which have clearly felt no need whatever to create a statutory duty for the State towards the born, whenever crippled or maimed.
Yet we fetishised the one celebrated cerebral palsy victim we had, Christy Brown, and pretended that our approach to physical disability was wholesome and open. It wasn't. It was winsome and hypocritical, and it traded in congenial and reassuring falsehoods.
This fiction was reinforced by yet another sickly and sentimental cinematic portrayal of Dublin working-class people as predictably witty, noble, dacent ould skins. Moreover, this was pure photogenic palsy. For Christy Brown was Arnold Schwarzenegger compared with many cerebral palsy victims, who are brain-damaged, incontinent and hopelessly spastic, and drive their minders to despair.
It is not legislatively difficult to provide for these people and their families. It is, to be sure, expensive; but the route currently being taken by parents - of suing the hospitals, and hence, their insurers - is already so horribly expensive that the State underwrites the insurance companies. Insurance premiums are simply a privatised form of taxation, and the cost of litigation and resultant awards are now so high that insurance companies cannot bear the weight, and have called on traditional, State taxation to help them pay out vast capital sums in settlements - which might have no long-term justification.
This is madness, from which only lawyers benefit. I deeply distrust welfare states, for they are admirable ways of making bonfires of taxpayers' money, and burning the lot, without increasing anyone's life expectancy by a single day. Yet, that enduring truth acknowledged, there is something wickedly negligent about our utter failure to make the State, as a matter of unsought course, legally responsible for the full, lifelong care of such unfortunate people as Robert Mulligan.