Terry Prone: The minister must apologise, and compensate the victims of thalidomide
Thalidomide survivor Maggie Woods and other survivors laying white roses outside the Dáil last November to mark the 60th anniversary of the international withdrawal of the Thalidomide drug when evidence of its catastrophic damage could no longer be ignored. Picture: Fran Veale
My computer-protection contract ended today, so every time the iPad is opened, down drops a warning of vulnerability to hackers of all sorts.
Ignored, those warnings go up a gear, with bright red flags and the announcement that I have visited porn sites. I have not.
But the very fact that this is clearly a successful marketing approach establishes just how many computer users have visited such sites and can easily be guilt-triggered.
“If you’re going on TV, don’t wear anything louder than you are.”
Great rule, invented by me. This morning, on Virgin Media’s Ireland AM, it gets accidentally broken when I wear sparkly silver boots.
No reaction to what I said, but hundreds of emails demanding where I bought them.
Today is the one-year anniversary of an email sent to the Irish Thalidomide Association by Health Minister Stephen Donnelly, expressing regret that he’d had to cancel a meeting with them on that day.
The email relayed his sincere apologies for cancelling at such short notice. It expressed his keen wish to meet with them and promised an alternative date would be arranged in the near future. One year later, they’re still waiting, and their spokesperson plaintively asks anyone who knows him to mention that to him.
I don’t know the minister, but I do know the thalidomide story. It was a pharmaceutical breakthrough. A wonder drug calming morning sickness in early pregnancy.
All over Europe, doctors fell on it with glad cries. They loved it. And then, like a drumbeat of disaster, came the births. Of babies born without limbs; of babies born with tiny limbs or hands attached to their shoulders without arms in between.
Because of poor information-sharing systems, it took a long time for Ireland to stop the sale of the drug, and that meant more births of little mites with distorted bodies. In an eerie precursor of the Sackler saga, the companies involved, Chemie Grunenthal (and The Distillers Company, which distributed the drug in Ireland), denied responsibility, denigrated the parents of the damaged children, delayed doing anything about it and diminished the amount of money they would pay.
Dr John O’Connell fought them heroically and got initial monies out of them. But Dr John could not have known how long the thalidomide victims would live, and so the amount allocated has proven to be inadequate.
The reality of life with this problem is that if, say, your hands emerge from your shoulders, you have to find ways around the function of your missing arms, and, as you move into your 60s, the rest of your body, which has always taken a dim view of your necessary contortions, simply goes on strike. You end up physically limited and in pain. Correction: More limited, and in greater pain.
Now, although more of the victims survived than was ever expected, only about 40 of them are still alive. Only about 40; not enough to create a great stir. Not new enough as a story to create headlines. The system can afford to postpone/ignore, instead of doing what the system should do: Apologise and compensate.
The apology needs to go to the surviving mothers of the victims — a handful of women in their 80s dogged all their lives by the sense that if they hadn’t taken the prescription, their son or daughter would be physically perfect.
Other countries have issued such an apology. Stephen Donnelly knows this and cares about it, according to himself. A 2018 tweeted video has him saying this: “We want justice for #Thalidomide victims born with severe disabilities after their pregnant mothers were sold the supposedly ‘safe’ sleeping pill. @fiannafailparty wants a new law to get them fair compensation.”
Clear. Right and proper. As was the ministerial intention to meet members of the association one full year ago. But now, he’s saying he can’t meet them because they’re suing the State. He agreed to meet them when this had already happened, Finola Cassidy, association spokesperson, points out:
"Indeed, to meet the children of the State, as we were when we were so catastrophically damaged 60 years ago. Lawyers are mere advisers, ministers and governments are decision-makers.”
What is the problem with the State publicly saying to a handful of elderly mothers: ‘You should never have had the prescription and on behalf of the nation of Ireland, we are sorry’?
Lawyers always advise against apologies. That’s their job. But Stephen Donnelly’s job is to stand up for that handful of sad women. He’s not doing it. At the simplest procedural level, failure to deliver on the promise “that an alternative date would be arranged in the near future” is lamentable and inexcusable.
A major function of ministers is that they relate directly to the citizens. They are, in civic truth, the ones standing between the system and the citizen. Stephen Donnelly hasn’t done that. Instead, he’s been Mr Media, appearing on radio and TV at the drop of a microphone. He couldn’t have yielded just one of those appearances on to another Cabinet member, and used the time to meet the thalidomide victims?
Of course he could.
But he made a choice that speaks volumes about his priorities, his competencies, and his humanity. Shame on him and shame on former ministers for health who looked with brief sympathy at the situation of a small bunch of heroes, and then looked away.
We have to hope that while he’s Taoiseach, Micheál Martin instructs his minister to speedily meet the thalidomide victims and, at long last, ensures his Government does the right thing by them.
If Covid is on its way out, could elbow bumping go with it?
The handshake was a way of saying: “I’m not holding a sword in my strongest hand. You, neither. We prove this by shaking hands.”
Elbow bumping proves and communicates the sum total of nothing.
A horrific femicide associates, forever, the name of the victim with the manner of her dying. Which must add a layer of misery for her family, even if laws and behaviours change as a result of that dying.
Forget the charms of birdsong in the lengthening evenings. Best sound in the world is electricians humming to themselves as they fix what’s wrong with your home.
The optician in Malahide says they’ve been flying, this last year, as a result of working from home. City workers used to pop out at lunchtime to get their eyes tested. Working from home, they can pick their time.
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