Irish Examiner view: State treats citizens as legal foes

Shane Corr, a senior civil servant at the Department of Health, went public with details of the secret dossiers. 

It is welcome news that the Taoiseach is to seek a policy review following revelations by a whistleblower that the Department of Health gathered sensitive, personal information about children with autism, without their knowledge or consent, to add to long-dormant legal files. That practice amounts to state surveillance of the most cynical kind.

Shane Corr, a senior civil servant at the department, showed the kind of courage and scruples that are absent from the heart of Government by highlighting how his own department secured confidential medical and educational information about children involved in legal cases against the State. 

While the collusion — and that is what it is — of the medical profession and school authorities is shocking, there is nothing surprising about the State’s heavy-handed legal defence of cases, even dormant ones. We have seen that time after time, as the State used all the legal weapons in its arsenal to wrestle to the ground anybody with the temerity to pursue their rights through the courts.

Protection of State over citizens

The pervading culture seeks to protect the State at all costs rather than to protect and provide for its citizens. That attitude has informed countless cases involving the survivors of sexual abuse seeking redress, children with special needs fighting for services, and, most recently, the victims of the CervicalCheck scandal. Recall the most recent case of retired nurse Joan Lucey who died from cervical cancer just hours after the HSE and laboratories agreed to begin mediation.

Clearly, the departments of health and education see nothing wrong with that approach as their statements following journalist Conor Ryan’s exposé on Prime Time Investigates made patently clear. Both departments underlined the legality — and the prevalence — of seeking and sharing information in legal cases.

It might be legal and, in some cases, it might even save the State some money to set a team of barristers on a citizen who feels the only way they can secure their rights is through the courts. You have to ask, however, if the money invested in building a legal case would not be better spent providing the service or the redress in the first place. In the long run, that might even be the more economical option. 

Betrayal of trust

But this is not just about economics. It is about ethics and morality and the betrayal of trust that has been laid bare by revelations that doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, and teachers shared confidential information on children, and the most vulnerable ones in our society at that. 

They have a case to answer before trust can even begin to be restored. And trust must be restored because we are living through a time when we have ceded an unprecedented range of freedoms to Government to help stem the spread of Covid-19. The general public is already weary; now they are wary too. Level 5 restrictions on movement, on trade, and on travel represent a return of the kind of big, interventionist state more common in wartime. If the Government is to instil faith in its citizens, it will have to start treating them as right-holders rather than opponents of the State. Do we want a State as friend, or as foe?