Parents criticise Martin over organ investigation

The parents of children whose organs were retained by hospitals without their consent have strongly criticised the Minister for Health, Mr Martin, over his handling of the official investigation into the controversy.

The Parents for Justice group yesterday called on the Minister to abandon the inquiry, headed by Ms Anne Dunne SC, which has now been running for 3½ years and which has cost more than €15 million to date.

The controversy over the retention of patients' organs by hospitals was re-ignited late last week when Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children contacted around 20 parents to inform them that pituitary glands taken from their children had been given to a pharmaceutical company.

The chairwoman of the Parents for Justice group, Ms Fionnuala O'Reilly, said the revelations that pituitary glands taken from children had been given to a pharmaceutical company "for a profit-making purpose" - to make human growth hormone - was shocking.

It has emerged that the pharmaceutical company involved, now known as Pharmacia Ireland, had made a modest donation of around £100 (€127) to a charitable research foundation at Our Lady's Hospital in Crumlin.

Parents for Justice accused the Minister of "selling a pup" to distressed families when he established the Dunne Inquiry.

She said that the Dunne inquiry, which is carrying out its work in private, had already missed five deadlines which it had set for itself and that the report which it has promised to publish by the end of the year will now only deal with the paediatric hospitals.

She said another layer of inquiries into post-mortem practices at the country's maternity hospitals, as well as other hospitals for adults, would have to be carried out at a later date.

Ms O'Reilly said that when the Dunne inquiry had been established in 2001, her group had been promised by the Minister that its findings would be subsequently examined by the Oireachtas Health Committee.

However, she said that following the Supreme Court ruling in the Abbeylara case, the legal opinion now available to her group was that it would be unconstitutional for the Oireachtas Health Committee to carry out the proposed investigation.

She said that "parents had been left with a toothless half-inquiry" which had no statutory powers to force hospitals and pharmaceutical companies to co-operate.

She said that every family who have had a post-mortem carried out on a deceased relative over the last 30 years could potentially be affected by the organ retention "scandal".

Ms O'Reilly said that parents had found out that organs taken from their dead children had been incinerated or thrown out with hospital waste, left lying on shelves or trafficked to pharmaceutical companies.