In office but without a single challenge, Leo’s loving Brexit

THE mother of 10-yearold British boy Lee Turton spoke this week about how frightened he was before he died in 1992 as a result of HIV infection after being given contaminated blood by the health service six years earlier.

She told how she couldn’t do anything to take away that awful fear from her beautiful son.

Her testimony to the contaminated blood inquiry in Britain would bring tears from a stone. Unfortunately, we in Ireland know of the terrible anguish that accompanies such tragedies because we’ve already been down that same road.

The same contaminated blood infected about 2,000 unsuspecting patients here in Ireland as well. Up to 2015 at least 260 of those people have died.

Of the 240 haemophiliacs who received contaminated blood about half of them are now dead.

Such outrageous trauma, delivered through what was supposed to be caring healthcare services in both Ireland and Britain, underscores the appalling amorality at the heart of the modern state.

The State consistently demonstrates a terrible capacity for reckless and outrageous indifference to the welfare of regular people.

Also, it demonstrates a pathological incapacity to change for the better.

That’s why more than 20 years after the contaminated blood scandal we had the CervicalCheck disaster involving more than 200 women, some of whom have also paid with their lives.

The State proves time and time again its utter determination not to learn from mistakes of the past.

And in the face of such manifest evil, the only rational response from the rest of us is suspicion.

We are right to be suspicious when Eoghan Murphy blathers on about this or that target aimed at solving the housing crisis which has 4,000 children banged up in hotel rooms and otherwise gulag accommodation – their parents prisoners in a cruel ideological bind of the government’s making.

We’re right to be suspicious when Simon Harris rabbits on as if he knows what he’s talking about while healthcare is coming apart at the seams and hospital consultants are voting no confidence in him at an emergency meeting.

And we’re entitled to question the real intentions of the likes of Richard Bruton when he talks platitudes about protecting the poor and vulnerable against the effects of higher carbon taxes. We know how that story ends.

Further, when Regina Doherty bangs on about how there is no intention to introduce a national identity card on the back of the Public Services Card we are entitled to raise our eyebrows in disbelief. In a speech against slavery in 1851 Wendell Phillips quoted that famous line about how vigilance is the price of liberty. He could have substituted ‘suspicion’ for ‘vigilance’.

The real sting in Phillips’s commentary came later. He cautioned how the ‘hand entrusted with power becomes the enemy of the people’ and only continued oversight can prevent even a democrat from ‘hardening into a despot’.

If that isn’t a call for suspicion and scepticism about those who we elect to act in our best interests then nothing is.

The truth at the core of Phillips’s alert is clear. We all know precisely what he means.

Those we elect to office must never be allowed to feel comfortable.

They must never be given the run of the place.

The Brexit soap opera has deflected our attention away from equally pressing matters of public policy and Leo Varadkar has taken full advantage of our oversight and neglect.

He’s loving it – in office but basically without challenge in the media, general public and certainly no challenge inside the Dáil from Micheál Martin.

We’re storing up a whole world of trouble by our lack of vigilance and suspicion. By our lack of protest and defiance.