Analysis: Relatively little serious crime is committed by people who are insane, writes Padraig O'Morain
It is the sane who persistently perpetrate most of the most sickening and serious crime which blights lives. What the Brennan case involved was one of those rare occasions on which an insane person committed a dreadful killing.
It is indisputable that we need to learn lessons from this - and that we failed to do so in the past.
We should have learned from the case of Brendan O'Donnell, who killed three people in horrifying circumstances in 1994. O'Donnell had been suffering the most severe mental disturbances from childhood and had had considerable contact with the psychiatric services.
He had been seen by a psychiatric service at the age of four. As a teenager an in-depth assessment recommended that he be given therapy which would include psychiatric input. He did not get it. Later, he was committed to a psychiatric hospital after attacking his sister but was released after two weeks.
David Brennan was taken to St Brigid's psychiatric hospital in Ardee by his family only hours before he abducted and killed the baby. The family believed he needed to be admitted and treated. Instead he was prescribed medication and sent home. The court heard yesterday that he has paranoid schizophrenia.
No doubt the decision to send him home is deeply regretted by those who made it. And making a psychiatric diagnosis is by no means an exact science.
As the inspector of mental hospitals, Dr Dermot Walsh, put it in an article in The Irish Times following the Brendan O'Donnell case, "it is common knowledge that psychiatrists differ in the weight they put on their perception of an individual's description of his subjective experience and of his behaviour and, not surprisingly, there are often diagnostic differences between psychiatrists dealing with the same case".
What this and other cases should throw a light on, however, is the poor condition of much of the State's psychiatric service. By and large, for instance, the psychiatric services rely solely on medication, a tendency which has worried the inspector.
But the sort of holistic, all-embracing service which psychiatrists would also like to see costs money. And psychiatry is the Cinderella of the health services.
This day fortnight the Minister for Health and Children will launch a website for Cork Advocacy Network, made up of parents who are deeply unhappy at the limited nature of the psychiatric treatment received by their children and who talk of being ignored and of a system which has failed them.
Mr Martin has complained of the low priority which the public places on improvements in psychiatric services.
If his heart really is in the right place he should put in train an inquiry to give the family of baby Jack Brennan and of David Brennan the answers they have been seeking and recommend changes in the psychiatric services to reduce the chances of anything as awful as this ever happening again.