In a democracy, the State's basic job is to uphold the fundamental rights of its citizens. The State and the people are essentially on the same side. So, if the State starts treating law-abiding, decent citizens as its enemies, something has gone very wrong.
In Ireland over the last decade, the most alarming sign that something is amiss in the democratic system is that, all too often, the State has ended up fighting good citizens in court. This week, with the State's decision to appeal the recent High Court judgment that upheld the right of an autistic man, Jamie Sinnott, to an education, it became clear that it intends to go on doing so.
The idea that the State would treat vulnerable citizens as enemies in the courts probably seemed fanciful to most people, until 1996, when the rainbow government threatened and harried the dying Brigid McCole, whom a State agency had infected with hepatitis C.
That case dramatised in the most tragic way that government departments had begun to think of themselves as institutions above and beyond the people they are supposed to serve.
In its aftermath, however, it seemed attitudes had changed. After the Finlay tribunal, it seemed there would never again be a case like Brigid McCole's.
Last month, after the High Court found that Jamie Sinnott, a 23-year-old autistic man from Ballinhassig, Co Cork, had a right to free primary education for "as long as he might benefit from it", the parties who were in power during the McCole case implicitly accepted that the days of the State fighting vulnerable citizens in the courts were over.
John Bruton told the Dail: "These mistakes have been made in the past, and no one is free of criticism. However, we should not fail to learn and we should not go on fighting cases which are eminently just, when they could be settled much less expensively and with much less pain."
Labour's Brendan Howlin added: "As a society and as a nation we have to change our ways to ensure that we do not put barriers in the way of anyone trying to vindicate basic rights."
It seemed the Government, too, had learned the same lessons. The Taoiseach told the Dail ruefully that the Sinnott case "is one of many very sad cases". Mr Ahern accepted: "There is no doubt that, over many decades, the State failed to provide the sort of education for children with special needs which they have a right to receive."
He was willing to "readily admit that we need to give more specialised care in many areas". Crucially, he seemed to accept that the High Court judgment was final: "The case is over and the judgment is made. We are doings things differently now".
In fact, however, the case is not over. Having forced Jamie Sinnott's mother, Kathryn, to spend a month arguing her case in the High Court, and having spent around a million pounds of taxpayers' money trying to deny Jamie the right to an appropriate education, the Government has decided to spend more money taking her to the Supreme Court. It has now decided she must go on struggling.
The decision is particularly significant because, in his ruling, Mr Justice Barr felt it necessary to warn the Government not to use a Supreme Court appeal as a delaying tactic. He said he would be seeking an undertaking from the Attorney General and the Chief State Solicitor that, if an appeal is to be taken, it will be prosecuted with the utmost urgency.
He did not want "any dragging of feet as in the O'Donoghue case". This was a reference to a previous case on the educational rights of a severely handicapped boy. Having won his case in 1993, he had to wait until 1997 for a Supreme Court appeal.
Mr Justice Barr suggested that much of the State's case in that action was put forward "without any hope of success on the appeal but with the intention of delaying the implementation of the O'Donoghue judgment".
That a judge feels it necessary to issue such a warning is deeply disturbing. In the Sinnott case the State is not contesting the facts, and is challenging the High Court ruling only on points of law. But those points of law are not abstract. They relate directly to a fundamental issue of social policy. Do all the children of the nation have a right to an adequate education or do they not?
This week's decision to appeal means that, for all the Taoiseach's Dail statements about the "right" of Jamie Sinnott to an education, the Government is still determined to limit such rights as much as possible.
The Department of Education's statement on the decision to appeal highlights the huge gap between policy aspirations on the one hand and real entitlements on the other. Even while the Minister for Education, Michael Woods, was insisting the State had been "generous and wholehearted" in its response to the Sinnott case, it makes it clear that his Department will fight all the way to keep educational provision in the realm of State generosity rather than of citizens' rights.
It is one thing for the State, in its court-enforced goodness, to give Jamie Sinnott a decent education. Accepting that a decent education is a basic right, however, is another matter altogether.
What the State is afraid of is that Mr Justice Barr's ruling will apply not just to Jamie Sinnott, or even to other young people in his position, but to all those whose education has fallen short of a basic standard. The key part of the Sinnott judgment is the finding that the "primary" education guaranteed as a right under the Constitution is a matter, not of age, but of need.
This might mean that people who have no recognised physical or mental disabilities but who are, for example, functionally illiterate, could claim the right to re-enter education. Rather than concede the possibility that such an entitlement might exist, the State is willing to go back on the Taoiseach's earlier statement that the Sinnott case "is over".
This desire calls into question the Government's seriousness about adult and second-chance education. Only a few months ago it published a White Paper on adult education full of aspirations for a system that would allow for "lifelong learning".
The need to tackle problems like Ireland's appalling rates of illiteracy has been trumpeted. Yet the possibility that a decent education might be recognised as a right belonging to every citizen is so alarming that the Government is prepared to endure the embarrassment of taking Jamie Sinnott back to court.
Meanwhile, a democratic State and a vulnerable but valuable citizen like Jamie Sinnott are still linked by a word that should never come between them: "versus". In the language of politics, it would not be acceptable to say that the Government is against Jamie Sinnott. In the harder language of the law, the truth is unavoidable.