The Blood Transfusion Service Board (BTSB) had no contingency plan to deal with the possible infection of haemophiliacs in the State with HIV, the tribunal was told.
Prof Ian Temperley, former director of the National Haemophilia Treatment Centre, said the board had no product recall policy. As the leading treater of haemophiliacs in the State, he did not advise the blood bank on the necessity of putting such a policy in place in the early 1980s.
However, Prof Temperley said that if the BTSB was dissatisfied with a product it made or distributed, he would have expected the board to recall the product.
The tribunal has been told that 105 people in the State contracted HIV from contaminated blood products. The first diagnosis was made in November 1984.
Prof Temperley was also questioned by the solicitor for the Irish Haemophilia Society, Mr Raymond Bradley, about the infection of a patient in 1986 with a batch of Factor 8 made by the Armour pharmaceutical company. The product, deemed to have been possibly unsafe by the BTSB, was returned by the board to Armour, which subsequently issued it to St James's Hospital.
A single dose of it was given to a patient in February 1986 and the patient tested HIV-positive in December 1986.
Prof Temperley said he wrote to Armour about this patient's infection and got an "inadequate" reply. The reply in January 1987 stated that his correspondence had been passed on to the company's director of clinical sciences. He did not receive any further correspondence.
Despite this, however, and the fact that Armour wished in 1988 to be indemnified against any infection its products might cause, Prof Temperley advised the BTSB to continue ordering blood products from Armour up to the end of 1989.
Prof Temperley said he tried to provide the best products for patients but it "turned out to be a tragedy".