Who's the patron saint of news management?

It's going to be an awkward run-in to St Patrick's Day for the Irish government. In the past they could rely on a media happy to go along with the boosterish elevation of the holy day into a weeklong festival and avoidance of the question of why it is that the national holiday requires most of the country's top officials to leave the country. But the scheduling of two by-elections for the end of this week and the public's loss of patience with the gap between Celtic Tiger hype and reality has changed the equation.

We've blogged before about the Republic's deficiencies, with roads being our pet peeve, but in terms of misery, it's the health service that probably involves the biggest signal that the country on top of so many economic league tables is facing relegation along one dimension. Any day's headlines are a litany of substandard healthcare: overcrowded emergency rooms, interminable waits for operations, patients in trolleys in corridors or even in the hospital car park.

And that's just the people whose ailments might at least be eventually solved by a stay in hospital. Even worse are the problems of families with serious long-term care problems. Every few years some new case of State indifference eventually works its way to public attention, and right now it's autism. It's a sign of the unresponsiveness of the Irish political system that even a government that suffered a serious black eye at the hands of one particularly vigorous mother of an autistic child still blunders into new versions of the same problem. At its core, the problem is the State's very rigid and minimalist conception of how it should support autistic individuals and their families, coupled with a strategy of stalling when anyone gets too demanding.

Hence the current crisis, unhelpfully located in County Meath, where one of the by-elections is taking place. The O'Hara family in Kells has four autistic children, and a years-long dispute between the family and the health authorities seems to have come to a head when the family started complaining to the media about their lack of support from the State. The State is now taking proceedings to have the children committed to residential care, against the wishes of the parents.

However Tuesday's Irish Times reports that a short-term truce has been reached with the parents in which the children will stay in care pending a psychiatric assessment of the parents. The parents sound sanguine about this although given the legal sledgehammer that the authorities were bringing to bear, their only real choice was likely to go along with it, if only to minimize any further bewilderment for their children.

There's not much else to say. It would certainly help if the overseas media got out of their regular rotation of Irish (non-Troubles) news stories: tech boom vs tradition/literature/smoking ban and showed a country that is not always, unlike in the Guinness ads, brilliant.

UPDATE 9 MARCH: A couple of new developments (subs. req'd) in the case. The O'Haras were in court yesterday to seek the return of their children. But the case was postponed until Friday and the judge ordered that neither side speak to the media. This won't have much effect on RTE, going by their website, which avoids the case like the plague anyway. However, the profile of the case may be enhanced because it is to be raised in the European Parliament:

[Member of European Parliament] Kathy Sinnott who has expressed support for the O'Haras. Ms Sinnott said she was planning to raise the issue during a European Parliament plenary session in Strasbourg later today.

UPDATE 11 MARCH: A protest today about lack of services for autistic children in the midlands. Today is also supposed to be another day in court for the O'Haras. It should be noted that the family has two legitimate grounds for complaint: services for their children, and the motivation of the health authorities in seeking to commit their children to care.

FINAL UPDATE: The O'Haras got their day in court, and won (link may require subs.). A judge considered the case behind closed doors and granted them custody of their children. It seems that the original State insistence on a psychiatric exam has also been set aside. The final word is best left to an expert:

The O'Hara's family doctor and chairman of the Irish Society for Autism, Dr James Hayes, said he was ecstatic at the outcome. "This frightful event should never have occurred," he said. "Whatever the crisis, there are other ways of dealing with it. Justice has been done and the family have been reunited."