Susie Long and Greg Robertson were good people, writes Fintan O'Toole. They believed in decent values, in giving to those who needed it.
Greg did voluntary work for the Chernobyl Children's Project. Susie worked for low pay for a charity that helps women and children in crisis. She and her husband couldn't afford to pay for private health insurance, but even if they could, they didn't believe in it. They "thought jumping queues was wrong". Then Greg was involved in a horrific car crash in Belarus, where he was volunteering to help those affected by the Chernobyl disaster. And Susie went to her GP in Kilkenny complaining that she was passing blood.
Susie died from bowel cancer on Friday night, because she had to wait seven months for a colonoscopy. Two days earlier, Greg's wife Ger was on Joe Duffy's Livelineprogramme, having to tell the nation that, after heart surgery and a stroke, there is no place for him at the National Rehabilitation Hospital because of cutbacks and that "whoever decided to cut that funding has in effect signed his death certificate".
This is where we live now. It is a vicious little place where a good person is a fool. Believing enough in the common good to be off spending your time in the misery of Belarus doesn't help you when you're unlucky and weak and need something back from the community. If you have no money for health insurance because you choose to work doing something decent for others, and you're also too squeamish to skip the queue for healthcare, what can you expect? An unnecessary death at the age of 41.
And an official culture in which none of this is really happening at all.
On the morning of the day Susie Long died, Minister for Health Mary Harney told Pat Kenny on RTÉ radio that her situation was "intolerable" and "unacceptable to me". She spoke as if she were viewing it all through a thick window pane, a horrified outsider forced to witness some weirdly disturbing spectacle. She hasn't been Minister for Health for three years now. She hasn't been driving forward a policy to copper-fasten a two-tier health system. She hasn't championed the National Treatment Purchase Fund, which as the consultant Michael O'Keefe put in the Sunday Times, means that doctors have an incentive to keep public patients on waiting lists because they "get paid for their public contract and then get paid again for procedures carried out on public patients through the NTPF". She isn't subsidising the building of co-located for-profit hospitals.
She has even blithely assured us that the HSE spending cuts which she has mandated would have no effect on patient services.
So Susie Long hasn't died because she had no VHI cover, since that would have been "intolerable". And it couldn't be true that Greg Robertson can't get into the National Rehabilitation Hospital in DúLaoghaire owing to the fact that patients already there can't be discharged because the HSE has cut funding for the home care packages they would need.
The sense of disconnection is almost total. Last May, Mary Harney assured us that reports then emerging about cutbacks in HSE services were "totally inaccurate". She could hardly have been more categorical: "by the end of this year, there will be substantially more staff working in delivering frontline health care services than at the start ... There will be no reduction in patient services anywhere as a result of government employment control policy or the HSE's implementation of it."
This disconnect is rooted in ideology and it is an ideology that enjoys the support of a very large block of Irish voters. Mary Harney and the Government as a whole do not believe in the simple proposition that citizens should be treated in accordance with their needs, not with their ability to pay.
One of the few areas on which there was an absolutely clear choice to be made by voters in the general election was on the direction of health provision.
Fianna Fáil and the PDs supported the expansion of private, for-profit hospitals. Fine Gael and Labour didn't.
With the clarity that comes from the knowledge that you are being killed by the State that is supposed to mind you, Susie Long expressed, in the long letter to Joe Duffy that can be read in today's Health Supplementthe core truth:
"The health service has been in the hands of Fianna Fáil and the PDs for years and all they can think to do is put resources into privatisation.
"They don't have the ability to change structures in the public sector that would put more resources toward patient care. But it's not just the politicians. I'm also angry at every single voter who voted for Fianna Fáil and the PDs because they thought they'd get a few more shillings in their pockets...
"We all knew before the last election what their health policies were and the majority of people ignored this and voted for them anyway. Maybe they thought this would never happen to them. Or maybe, because so many have private health insurance, they just didn't care because they were alright, Jack."