The real sacrifice

It's a sign of the currently accident-prone nature of the Irish government that they've wandered into a controversy on an issue where the plan was to stay as quiet as possible. That issue is embryonic stem-cell research, which was the issue that in summer 2001 George Bush had convinced himself was the most pressing one facing the nation. The rest is history.

Anyway, the Irish version of the problem is whether to install an explicit ban on the research in Ireland, but the Minister for Enterprise and Employment, Micheál Martin, went seriously off-message on a trade mission to China -- almost as bizarre, in the parochial context as if, for example, the finance minister started holding forth on policy regarding the nuclear deterrent. Martin made two statements that sound very reasonable: that the science contains many unknowables, and that in the long-term it could lead to cures for diseases [Irish Times, subs. req'd]:

But I said that if it emerged in the future that it could be of value in treating very debilitating and chronic diseases such as multiple sclerosis, motor neurone disease or Alzheimer's, then I would have an open mind.

In saying so, however, he ran up against the a la carte ethics that represent current policy:

A spokeswoman for the Department of Enterprise and Employment in Dublin said yesterday that the official policy in relation to embryo stem-cell research, as set out by the Minister, was that the Government wanted to maintain the position of "ethical subsidiarity".

She said he had said that this meant that Ireland did not tell other countries or seek to influence what other countries did in terms of research programmes and research projects.

This matters because Ireland contributes to European Union pots of money that could be used for stem-cell research, so their position is that there can be no stem cell research in the country, but that they may passively finance it elsewhere. This is the inverse of the George Bush position, in which the research is allowed but federal government funding is prohibited. The Bush position fails the simple consistency test of: if you really think it's wrong, why aren't you banning it?

But the official Irish position is, if anything, more hypocritical, since it contains no commitment not to use any medical gains that arise from the research. Thus the unpleasant stuff can be dumped off to other countries, while the outcomes thereof are cherry-picked. It does provide the unintentional comedy that comes from combining 1950s and 2000s government policy on moral issues:

According to recent reports, Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern told Pope Benedict that the Republic intended passing legislation to ban such research. Asked about plans to do this, Mr Martin said he had no knowledge of such proposals.