Cystic Fibrosis: The Minister for Health, Mr Martin, was yesterday urged to intervene in a dispute between two hospitals in the UK over whether a 29-year-old Irish man is suitable for a lung transplant operation.
Mr Billy Burke from Killorglin, Co Kerry, was found by a hospital in Newcastle to be unsuitable for a transplant but a hospital in Manchester, from where his family sought a second opinion, said he was a suitable candidate for the operation.
The Manchester hospital then said it would only operate if the lungs provided for him came from the Irish donor pool.
The Burke family believed this would be straightforward until they discovered lungs donated in Ireland are only given to the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle under a long-running agreement between it and the State.
Newcastle has refused to put Mr Burke on its priority list for when lungs are donated.
Yesterday the Cystic Fibrosis Association of Ireland (CFAI) and the Burke family appealed to Mr Martin to intervene.
Mr Burke's sister Lisa said she met the Minister, Mr Martin, in January and hoped he would do something.
"He said he would look into it and do anything he could to help us but we have had no results from that meeting," she said.
She has since been told by Mr Martin's officials that the Minister could not, as a politician, be seen to intervene in clinical decision-making.
However she says time is running out for her brother, a cystic fibrosis sufferer who is on oxygen 24 hours a day.
Yesterday she insisted Mr Martin must do something radical to stop bureaucracy preventing her brother getting a second chance at life.
Cystic fibrosis is an incurable and degenerative disease, affecting both young and increasingly older people.
In most cases a lung transplant is a sufferer's only hope of prolonging their life.
Ms Burke emphasised that doctors in Manchester hadn't made their decision on her brother's suitability for a transplant lightly.
"They went through him with a fine tooth comb for a week and a half and researched the bug in his lungs which Newcastle said made him unsuitable for a transplant."
The CFAI says Irish organs should be available to Irish patients irrespective of where the transplant takes place and called for a review of the current exclusive arrangement with the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle.
That arrangement was entered into when the Republic did not have its own lung transplant unit.
Now it does, at Dublin's Mater Hospital. The unit was opened last week and is hoping to conduct its first lung transplant this summer. However it is unlikely to begin with a double lung transplant of the type Mr Burke would require.
Ms Mary Lane Heneghan, national honorary secretary of the CFAI, said Mr Burke would die if he did not get a transplant soon. She said her association was 100 per cent behind the Burke family's plea.
If no lung donation becomes available, Ms Burke says her family will accept this.
She said it's the fact that her brother might not even get the chance of being donated a lung because of the exclusive arrangement the State has with one UK hospital that her family finds difficult to take.
She added that the last thing her family wanted was to bring their difficulties into the public domain but they had been trying behind the scenes for months to get the issue resolved to no avail.
"We tried the diplomatic route but time is running out now," she said.
"I've no interest in slating the Minister but I believe he could do something and he has to do something now," she added.
In a statement last evening, the Department of Health said it was aware of this case.
It said that in the area of transplantation, ethical and clinical guidelines are paramount. "In all cases, there is a national transplantation list and it is a matter for the clinicians involved in all cases to decide on the utilisation of organs for transplantation," the statement said.