As a large part of the population sets out this weekend on its holidays, so the various tribunals, set up to examine various wrong-doings in public life, close down for their summer recesses.
The holiday-makers will have some respite from the allegations of sleaze and corruption, white envelopes and brown paper bags, which have beset the body politic in recent decades. Most will be relieved not to have to hear, day after day, about planning permissions and Ansbacher accounts and the rest, even if many will be pleased to return to the untangling of various twisted skeins when the tribunals resume their business in the autumn. But the injured parties involved in one tribunal will almost certainly be glad to get back to business on September 12th. For many of them, time is of the essence.
"This is not an inquiry into brown bags to politicians, or rezoning. This is people's lives, their deaths and the effects on their families". Thus, Mr Martin Hayden, counsel for the Irish Haemophilia Society, addressing an early hearing of the Haemophilia Infection Inquiry last December when the modus operandi of the tribunal was still under discussion. One of the witnesses which the society had intended to call to bear witness to the tragedy under investigation had already died as a result of becoming infected with a virus transmitted by a contaminated blood product provided to treat his haemophilia. Some 260 haemophiliacs had become infected with the very products designed to treat their condition, and more than 60 had already died.
There was some unseemly bickering at the start about whether the State would meet the legal costs of the Haemophilia Society's members and there was a very understandable anxiety among those members that their witnesses should be heard first. By the time the hearings got to the substance of the inquiry, it was May and the first two weeks of those hearings provided some very harrowing accounts of pain and anger which were to provide the human context within which the more technical hearings would proceed.
It would be wrong at this stage to attempt to prejudge the ultimate outcome of the hearings - only three witnesses from the Blood Transfusion Service have been heard so far with a dozen or more still to be heard in this module of the inquiry. It is enough to note that a picture has emerged of a blood transfusion service in a state of considerable disarray, suffering not only the drastic changes imposed by a transfer of directorial power but caught also by the quantum change required in safety standards by the emergence of the Human Immuno-deficiency Virus and the newly discovered Hepatitis C virus as contaminants of the blood supply itself.
A great deal more needs to be heard about just how and why the Blood Transfusion Service came to fail some of its most dependent patients before any conclusions can be reached or recommendations made. It is a great pity that much of this detail is not the stuff of snappy media reports. These hearings, under the sympathetic and efficient chairmanship of Judge Alison Lindsay, have already attracted much less media attention than the inquiries into possible political malfeasance. That won't damage the outcome of the tribunal, but it may limit its educational impact on a society that should be keen to learn exactly how and why these matters of life and death in the health services came to be the subject of a tribunal in the first place.