Joe Brolly tries to change our world

Welcome to my new online abode – pull up a virtual chair and warm your hands at the internet fire…

OK, social issue today. Did you watch Joe Brolly – Perfect Match (RTE1) last night? It was a terrific programme. Took us through what we know already – that Brolly offered his kidney to a club-mate and then the kidney transplant, after all that sickness and pain and slow recovery, was a failure. But behold, out of the ashes of that heart-breaking experience, Brolly and his now friend  Shane Finnegan rose phoenix-like to campaign for a change in the law, north and south. At present we sign up (or more usually not) to having our organs used after death. You’d think it’d be common: after all, when you’re dead you’re through with using them. But there’s an organ famine and hundreds of people are waiting, most of them in vain, for a life-saving transplant. So Brolly and Finnegan are urging the ‘soft-option’ – that is, if you don’ t declare otherwise during your life, it’s assumed that you’ve given your consent to have your organs used after death. And even then, your family or relatives have the right to refuse their use. A double lock, then, if needed. But the norm would become the donating of organs by those who die, rather than the opposite as is now the case.

So Joe went up to Stormont and chatted with Martin McGuinness and Peter Robinson. They got a good reception and things appear positive there. They went down to Dublin and…guess what?  Health Minister  James O’Reilly was non-commital and the CEO of the Irish Kidney Association was – wait for this one – opposed to the idea. Why? Search me. I thought at one point he was arguing they had the suggested system in operation at present under another name, but that couldn’t be possible. However  it was clear beyond any doubt that he was   opposed. Could it be that he was agin it because he hadn’t thought of it first? Or could it be that he didn’t like this damned nordie with Shinner connections coming down here to tell him how to run his business? Pass on that one. But it appears that a scheme which makes eminent sense, would almost certainly lead to the transformation of hundreds of lives, is being taken up a siding and parked.

It’s not often you get a situation where something is unambiguously good: this is one of them. I suggest that anyone who opposes such legislation should receive an automatic sentence of  six months in the slammer for a crime against humanity. Although…No, on second thoughts that’d be unfair. People who are insane belong in a mental institution, not in jail. But they definitely should be put somewhere that they can’t do any more harm. Or prevent others from doing good.

As a GAA pundit  Joe Brolly does the business – he’s passionate and he gets up the nose of that Kerry chap with pleasing regularity. As a human being he’s already proved himself heroically unselfish. Now he’s on the brink of bringing about a change in law that would be life-saving and life-transforming. If he’s not successful, let’s have a list of those politicians who blocked him. And let’s damn them to electoral hell the next time round.