A lengthy defence of the findings of the Lindsay Tribunal and of the judge herself made in a barristers' journal has been criticised by the Irish haemophilia Society.
The opinion piece in the latest issue of the Bar Review, a Bar Council journal, was accused yesterday by the IHS chairman, Mr Brian O'Mahony, of being patronising and seeking to justify the tribunal findings without going into any specifics.
The tribunal inquired into how more than 260 haemophiliacs were infected with HIV and hepatitis C through blood products. Seventy-nine of them have died. When the report was published last September, the IHS expressed profound disappointment.
The Bar Review article said the report contained criticisms of the BSTB and of certain doctors but stopped short of placing the blame on any one individual or entity. The judge recommended that the report should not be referred to the DPP.
The judge's conclusions had been described as "weak" and "limited" mainly because no one had specifically been made accountable, it said.
"Sometimes, however, there are no straightforward answers and no convenient cast of villains. Sometimes, it is not possible to squeeze the events of years into a pithy executive summary," it stated.
The article said Judge Lindsay was handed a thankless and complex brief and in the absence of a conclusion fingering a specific "fall guy" her report was always unlikely to find favour with the victims and their families.
It also defended the judge by stating that she was constrained from publicly defending her report and the criticisms. The article said it was not fair to fault a report because it did not amount to a "heads will roll blockbuster".
If an inquiry was to be judged by the number of scalps taken, this could have disturbing repercussions for future investigations and for further modules of the Flood Tribunal, it stated.
"If a tribunal member, upon hearing all the evidence, concludes that he or she cannot deliver a set of black-and-white conclusions, then so be it. We are best served by judges who understand not only the black and the white but who also appreciate the subtler and more muted shades of grey," the article concluded.
Mr O'Mahony said he totally disagreed with what was said in the article, particularly as the IHS had always maintained that not all the relevant evidence had actually been heard.
He said he found the opinion piece somewhat patronising and took issue with statements in the article, including "the public must be constantly reminded that the aim of a tribunal is not to establish guilt or innocence".