If he wants to be Taoiseach, Michael Noonan will have to exorcise a ghost. The spectre which haunts his victory celebrations is Brigid Ellen McCole, a 54-year-old Co Donegal woman who died of liver failure in St Vincent's Hospital, Dublin, in October 1996.

On Thursday night's Prime Time, Mr Noonan described Mrs McCole's death as one of the emotional and intellectual watersheds of his personal and political life, comparing its impact on him to the IRA's murder of a soldier and a garda during his term as minister for justice. He said he had changed as a result of it. His credibility as the man to restore confidence in Irish democracy depends crucially on his ability to convince the public of the profundity of that change.

Michael Noonan's handling of the McCole case after he became minister for health in late 1994 is almost as puzzling as it is shocking. He took up the job with nothing to defend. He bore no personal responsibility for the appalling mixture of incompetence and evasion through which the State poisoned over 1,600 women. He was not even a member of the Cabinet which had responded so inadequately to the emergence of the scandal in February 1994.

Coming to the job with a fresh eye, clean hands and a keen political intelligence, he was perfectly placed to focus on the core issue: that a terrible wrong had been done to innocent citizens and that his primary role was to uphold their rights.

From the start of his involvement with the aftermath of the hepatitis C debacle, however, Michael Noonan seemed determined to hold the departmental line. This meant insisting that a non-statutory expert group report published in February 1995 was the last word on the scandal, even though he learned early on that it gave a very incomplete account.

It also meant ensuring that the victims should be compensated through the non-statutory tribunal established for that purpose, rather than through the courts. The tribunal made awards without admission of liability, whereas the courts would seek to establish, in essence, who was to blame. This would, in turn, reveal shocking failures on the part of the Department itself.

These two aims were intertwined when it became clear that in the discovery of documents for Mrs McCole's High Court case, information was emerging which turned the scandal from a terrible accident to a saga of almost incomprehensible negligence in which the Department of Health was deeply implicated.

On July 21st, 1995, the Chief State Solicitor, acting for Michael Noonan, warned Positive Action, the umbrella group for the victims, that unless they went quietly to the compensation tribunal they would face "uncertainties, delays, stresses, confrontation and costs". Any cases the victims might take would be defended by the State, "if necessary to the Supreme Court".

When Mrs McCole chose, nevertheless, to pursue her case, the State's threat of confrontation and stress was put into action. The State opposed her attempts to preserve her privacy by suing under an assumed name. It tried to stop her in her tracks by pleading the statute of limitations. It even denied, for the purposes of the case, that the BTSB ever manufactured anti-D, the serum with which Mrs McCole and 1,600 others were poisoned.

The BTSB - though without the prior knowledge of Mr Noonan - placed a lodgement in court, a device which puts extra pressure on a plaintiff.

All of this was done at a time when the full extent of the scandal was still unknown to the public. As more and more questions were being asked, Michael Noonan, in a savage irony, used Mrs McCole's case as an excuse for not holding a public inquiry, claiming that the case itself would act, in effect, as a tribunal. Yet, at the same time, he was at least tacitly a party to a legal strategy aimed at ensuring that the case would never come to court.

The nastiest aspect of all of this was that Brigid McCole's High Court case had a special urgency. She was in imminent danger of death. In April 1996, Dr Garry Courtney, a consultant at Beaumont Hospital, Dublin, told the court that Mrs McCole "may develop decompensated liver disease within several months which could arise without warning". Six months later, Mrs McCole's death certificate gave the cause of death as decompensated liver disease due to hepatitis C infection.

Only 12 days before her death did the BTSB finally admit that it was liable for the immense harm it had done to her. Yet, in the very letter which contained this admission, it also threatened Mrs McCole with massive costs should she lose her court case.

"If," the board warned Mrs Cole's solicitors, "your client proceeds with her claim for aggravated and exemplary/punitive damages against our client and fails, then our client will rely on this letter in an application to the court against your client for all costs relating to the claim for such damages and for an order setting off any costs to which your client might otherwise be entitled."

It emerged at the Finlay tribunal that this letter was shown to Michael Noonan before it was sent and was not altered after he had seen it. It seems that he was at least tacitly in agreement with the issuing of a threat to a dying woman.

Yet the firm impression conveyed by Mr Noonan's statements on the issue was that his role was much more distant. In October 1996, after Mrs McCole's death, he strongly implied to the Dail that he was not involved in the BTSB's legal strategy. He had, he said, been "informed" of what was going on but "I was not asked for my permission. I was not asked to make a policy decision."

THIS impression that the BTSB and his Department were conducting totally separate legal strategies was later called into question when, on RTE Radio 1, Michael Noonan's Cabinet colleague, Brendan Howlin, said that the McCole issue was "handled by government in relation to the advice that was given and the strategies that were taken by the government . . . the minister at the time and the government made the decision in relation to how these things happen . . ."

In a functioning democracy, the word "versus" in the title of the legal case "Brigid Ellen McCole versus the Minister for Health", setting the interests of a wronged citizen against the interests of her political protector, would have no conceivable meaning. That Michael Noonan continued to insist on it until public outrage forced him to establish a tribunal of inquiry and to apologise for an attack on Mrs McCole's lawyers in the Dail calls into question his ability to restore trust in that democracy.

Unless and until he spells out in much more detail what he has learned from the whole episode, it will not be easy for the public to trust his instincts.

fotoole@irish-times.ie