Kathleen Lynch (Cork North Central, Labour)

I concur to a great extent with many of the last speaker's comments. Having this legislation before the House that has been in the making for the past nine years and on which there was extensive consultation in the past two years beggars belief. The people who entered the negotiations with the Tánaiste's officials did so in good faith. They are not unreasonable people. If we were dealing with unreasonable people, this debate would not be so calm. They are not rebels or out to cause trouble. Rather, they had normal lives until this happened to them. They needed to become politicised to provoke action and to ensure that their difficulties were managed in a statutory framework. While they achieved this, it was not easily done.

The next obstacle they needed to surmount was that of insurance. We are discussing young men and women who could not get mortgage protection and, therefore, could not get mortgages. We are discussing people in their early 50s who had paid their mortgages and wished to take holidays. Despite being nervous about getting sick while abroad, they could not get travel insurance because of particular health problems. We are discussing men and women with young families who could not get the life assurance policies that would have given them and their families a degree of comfort. These are privileges we all expect. For fear that anyone will claim that I did not say so, I should have commenced by stating that I have an interest in this matter, as I am rhesus negative and was given anti-D in 1977.

We are discussing normal people who were hoping to live normal lives. The events that occurred were not of their making. The people responsible walked away scot free, which was the greatest injustice of all. We are not only discussing women, but a range of people, such as young men and women and those in their prime as we would currently define it. These people had perfectly normal lives and in certain circumstances were given transfusions of infected blood. Women who went to hospital for what should have been one of life's most joyous occasions, namely, having a baby, received anti-D and suffered the consequences.

Why are these three provisions in the legislation? The Title of the Bill makes no reference to insurance, yet the Bill is fundamentally about that issue. It should be stand-alone legislation, but this is akin to a three-card trick merchant playing "Find the lady". In any major European city, a huckster putting together a three-card trick table would be arrested and run off the streets for fraud, but here it is in Parliament, introduced by someone whom we all expected to be a caring Tánaiste. She has been badly advised. When she stood up in the Chamber this morning and said that no one will be excluded by the Bill, she was not telling the truth.

There are people who have still not made the connection between infection and their ongoing bad health, nor has it occurred to their general practitioners. There are people who are about to fall in love with someone who has been infected. They are not considering compensation or their future beyond what we all considered when we fell in love, that is, a happy-ever-after ending. However, in this instance, it will not be happy ever after. There will be consequences and matters to be managed. It was in this context that the original compensation Act was introduced. It put in place a structure that enabled people to manage lives that had been altered by the State, not to research a cure.

When the Tánaiste says no one will be excluded, she is wrong. I do not know who is advising her, but those people are wrong. The reason they are advising her is interesting — the mindset of closing off an appalling vista. I have news for them. The appalling vista happened between the late 1970s and early 1990s. This Bill tries to set right the appalling vista and the Government, which appears to have a death wish, will bring down on its head an awful price that it must pay. Is it true that circumstances change but we do not, as mentioned by the last speaker? In this instance, it seems to be the case.

The Tánaiste rightly stated that Positive Action agreed that the definition should be based on a diagnosis by the ELISA test. That was the case in the original Bill presented to the then Minister for Health in 1995 before the 1997 Finlay report, which has been accepted as the Bible in the matter. The Bill is about the three-card trick and spin, but the latter will not work, as the people involved are so conversant with this legislation and so aware of the consequences of this change to their lives that they will not be fooled.

It is important that the conclusions of Ms Justice Finlay Geoghegan on this issue be read into the record. However, we now have evidence in the form of a letter from the blood bank, as it was then, to Ms Justice Finlay Geoghegan. Referring to the fact that only a maximum of 100 people were affected, which makes it astonishing that the Minister's advisers are allowing this to happen, it states:

However we now have evidence that it is also possible (although apparently rare) for a person to be infected and subsequently lose both detectable virus and indeed detectable antibodies. This happened in the case of donor Y. While we have no laboratory means of identifying these persons, we have however taken a history of symptoms or signs from those who received BTSB anti-D. We are thus aware of 74 recipients of 1977 anti-D who had an episode of jaundice at that time which is most likely to be related to exposure to hepatitis C.

We need to start reminding ourselves that the first we heard of this was on "Morning Ireland" in 1991 or 1992. The first the blood bank heard about it was in 1990 or 1991, when the university in England which was carrying out the test for the blood bank wrote to the BTSB in Dublin. The letter was from the original report into what went wrong in the blood bank and stated that there was something in the blood. It was not non-A nor non-B but something else was there.

It was first discovered 15 years ago that hepatitis C existed. Now the Minister for Health and Children tells us that men, women and children who were infected in the peak year in 1977 should have a conscious history of their symptoms, but this disease does not have a history. We do not know enough about it, because it is so new. However, the Minister does, as do her advisers, who say if people test negative under ELISA it means there is nothing wrong with them. That is complete rubbish. Experts in the field will say they do not know everything about the disease, but they know that nothing is foolproof and that ELISA does not pick everything up. Women test negative for both antibodies and virus but will swear they have been infected and suffer the symptoms. How can the Minister say nobody will be excluded when people do not even make the connection between infection and symptom?

One witness called by the State, and I am sure the Department officials will know of this because they seem to know everything else, made a very telling report. He writes:

However, several longitudinal studies have documented the subsequent loss of antibody reactivity over time in those with cleared infection. In the East German anti-D cohort from whom early samples were available for testing, 18 from 43 women who cleared infection became seronegative for antibody over an interval of ranging 8-20 years.

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