GAVAN Hanlon has never been to a race night, let alone organised one to raise funds for a ministerial re election campaign. He has never applied for a job in a minister's office that was advertised only in an internal party newsletter. He has never been offered rare opportunities for access to the Minister for Finance in return for a small consideration.
No questions have ever been asked in the Dail about the size of his mobile phone bill. And he is almost certainly the worse for his negligence in such matters. For if he had managed to do any of these things, we might recognise an obvious truth about him: that he is centrally involved in a disgraceful scandal.
The outbreak of righteousness in Irish politics: in the last few years has been in some respects a good thing, and it has established at least an awareness of standards in public life. But it has also led to new absurdities - the idea that there is something wrong with the marketing manager of the Abbey Theatre organising, in a purely private capacity, a public fund raising event for the Minister for the Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht being the most obvious recent example.
And it has confined the notion of scandal to what politicians do, rather than what they fail to do. Most of the worst scandals in Ireland are sins of omission rather than commission, of neglect and indifference rather than of active malevolence.
Scandal is, or should be, the capacity for outrage through which a democratic society enforces a clear sense of what is and is not acceptable. The worst thing about sensationalism is that it diminishes that capacity by cheapening and trivialising it.
And there is a real danger of precisely this happening here, of a society losing sight of the scandals that don't cause outrage, because they are too mundane, too unsensational, too much a matter of what is not happening rather than what is. The fate of Gavan Hanlon and many like him is one of them.
GAVAN is 11 years old and autistic. He has some peculiarity in his brain that makes it very difficult for him to relate coherently to the world around him, and more especially to the people around him.
Autism is doubly hard on parents because the normal rewards for selfless love - affection, gratitude, communication - are often absent. Periods of rapid but hard won progress can be followed by periods of utter regression in which everything that has been achieved can seem suddenly to be undone.
Minding children like Gavan can be a terrible burden, and if one of the best things in life is the heroism with which ordinary people bear it, one of the worst is that much of the heroism is unnecessary. Families have to be heroic because society is neglectful.
The education of an autistic child is difficult. As his parents, John and Mary Hanlon, describe in a booklet they have recently published called A Journey With Gavan, he has had to be taught everything that a normal child simply picks up. Every piece of social interaction, every expression of emotion or affection, has had to be shaped for him. And even when he has been taught something, he may not use it as other children would.
He learned words such as xylophone, chocolate and octopus, but then became obsessed with them, insisting on spelling them out, refusing to pronounce them. At the age of seven he became fixated on Scrabble: not with the game itself - which he could not understand - but with arranging the letters on the board in groups of eight.
It is obvious that the peculiar combination of great intelligence and great inwardness in such a child produces very particular educational needs and requires very skilled schooling. There are highly developed programmes for meeting those needs.
In the UK there are over 80 schools for autistic children. In Northern Ireland there are specific programmes in special schools for autistic children. But in the Republic there are no schools for autistic children at all, and no specific programmes in special schools.
Gavan attends a school for "emotionally disturbed" children. Other autistic children go to schools for children with mental disabilities. A few, whose autism is mild, go to mainstream national schools, but the evidence suggests that even those who can cope academically often fail because of their lack of basic social skills.
NONE of them should be classified as either emotionally disturbed or mentally handicapped. They have a condition that has been recognised by scientists since 1943. There are established ways, not of curing that condition, but of giving those who suffer from it the right supposedly guaranteed under the Constitution, to an education that actually meets their needs.
One result of this neglect is that some people with autism, as they get older, end up as long stay patients in psychiatric hospitals. Without proper education, their problems get worse, their behaviour degenerates, they are prescribed drugs, the psychic shell around them hardens. For many parents of autistic children, the fear of what will happen to their son or daughter after they themselves die is the heaviest burden they have to bear.
Two years ago, in reply to a Dail question about Gavan's situation, the Minister for Education asked that "a recent psychological assessment and a report from a child psychiatrist be made available to my Department". Gavan's parents therefore took him to London where he was assessed by experts. Very detailed reports, including 14 specific recommendations on appropriate education for Gavan, were drawn up and sent to the Department in February 1995.
But nothing happened, and Gavan has remained at the school for emotionally disturbed children, without the education he needs.
There are currently two small pilot projects for the education of autistic children, one in Dublin and one in Clare. But most children like Gavan have no chance of an appropriate education. Providing it would be a modest undertaking: maybe four small units in Dublin and one in each of the other health board areas, with a total of about 25 places in each year. The cost of such early intervention would almost certainly be much less than the later cost of picking up the pieces.
The fact that Irish society cannot or will not provide an education for children like Gavan really is a scandal. For in that failure is a statement about Gavan's place in our society: that he doesn't have one.
The things that make him what he is are unacknowledged. In his presence, the system itself is like an autistic child, unresponsive, self absorbed, deficient in the ability to communicate. And a system that cannot respond to the very specific needs of a small group of children can hardly hope to respond to the broader need to treat the children of the nation equally.