An application to show at the tribunal three television documentaries on the risks which US blood products posed to haemophiliacs was rejected yesterday.
Seeking their admission as evidence, counsel for the Irish Haemophilia Society, Mr John Trainor SC, said the World In Action programmes made in 1975 and 1985 "screamed for a response" in the mid-1970s and 1980s from the Blood Transfusion Service Board. They showed the risk of viral transmission and how commercial companies were profiteering from the making of blood-clotting agents from the blood of paid donors. These donors included homosexuals and drug addicts.
He said in light of the allegations made, the inactivity of the BTSB from 1975 onwards was "unforgivable".
Mr Trainor said the programmes cast doubt over whether Baxter Travenol was screening donors to its plasma pools, from which blood products were made and imported to Ireland, and this appeared to make it an act of "irresponsible madness" for the BTSB to continue dealing with the company without checking the allegations.
The programme makers, he said, had visited the company's plasma collection clinics in the US. If the then director of the BTSB, Dr Jack O'Riordan, had wished to check for himself what was happening he felt sure Travenol would have paid for the trip given that it had once sent him on a "junket" to Las Vegas.
The tribunal has already heard that the company paid for Dr O'Riordan to attend a conference in the US.
He said the programmes showed the extent to which the BTSB should have been aware of the risks of hepatitis and HIV involved and they included comments from medical experts.
Neither counsel for the BTSB nor counsel for Prof Ian Temperley, former director of the National Haemophilia Treatment Centre, objected to the tapes being seen. However, counsel for the tribunal, Mr John Finlay SC, said it would be inappropriate to admit them as evidence as they included allegations, not facts, and the two might be confused.
This did not mean the contents of the programmes could not be put to witnesses, he said.
Mr Trainor said he did not see the logic in Mr Finlay's submission and he felt to proceed with the content of the programmes and no pictures was to do so "in blinkers".
After rising to consider the matter, the tribunal chairperson, Judge Alison Lindsay, said the programmes should not be shown. They were not proper evidence as people in them could not be cross-examined. They contained allegations, not proof, and could bring about confusion and blur the issues which had to be considered.