Report fundamentally flawed, claim parents

Reaction: The Parents for Justice organisation, which represents families affected by the organ retention controversy, last night criticised the Madden report as "fundamentally flawed".

However, the report was welcomed by pathologists and the Irish Hospital Consultants' Association.

Parents for Justice said the report had been flawed from the outset as under its terms of reference it could not deal with cases where organs of stillborn children, teenagers or adults had been retained by hospitals.

It said the report could only concentrate on the cases of children up to the age of 12 years.

It also claimed that the report did not address whether hospitals had passed on body parts other than pituitary glands to pharmaceutical companies.

The administrator of Parents for Justice, Charlotte Yeates, also criticised Tánaiste Mary Harney for failing to provide the organisation with an advance copy of the report prior to its general publication. She said that the organisation no longer had confidence in Ms Harney or the Department of Health to deliver effective solutions to the organ retention issue.

Parents for Justice, is to hold an extraordinary general meeting before the end of the month to determine its formal response to the report.

The organisation said it was clear successive ministers in the Department of Health had been aware for 24 years that hospitals had been disposing of pituitary glands to pharmaceutical companies and receiving money for them.

"The report infers that only a limited number of pituitary glands were sold to pharmaceutical companies. This is contrary to what was discovered by the media in 2004," it stated. It said that the principal reason for the controversy was the failure of successive governments to legislate on the matter of postmortems.

"The anxiety, stress, grief and trauma that ensued for our members was as a direct result of this failure to legislate. We demand that long-awaited legislation be enacted as a matter of urgency to avoid the repetition of the mistakes of the past," it said.

The faculty of pathology of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland welcomed the report.

It said it confirmed that "the practice of pathologists was in line with best international practice and that no blame should attach to any of the pathologists involved".

The faculty particularly welcomed the recommendation for a new legal framework for postmortem practices.

Dean of the faculty Prof Seán O'Briain said that it acknowledged the acute distress felt by many parents and agreed with Dr Madden that the cause of this lay in a communications gap between parents and the medical profession. He said that as soon as this communications gap had become apparent, the faculty had issued new guidelines on postmortem practices.

Minister for Justice Michael McDowell said that he endorsed "the generality of its recommendations" in the report.

He said that proposed new legislation governing the work of coroners contained significant new provisions about the conduct of postmortems.