Records of the retention of babies' organs after post-mortems might no longer exist in some cases, the Master of the Rotunda Hospital said yesterday.
Dr Peter McKenna said that of 170 queries which the hospital had received from parents since last week, 50 related to the years before 1980.
People who contacted the hospital's help-line would receive whatever information could be provided.
He said the work of retrieving records of post-mortems over the years would stretch the resources of hospitals in general.
The retention of organs arose because of meticulous record-keeping in laboratories, he said. The more careful the pathology department, the more likely it was to have retained organs.
In maternity hospitals the job of the pathologists was to find the cause for as many peri-natal deaths as they could.
Dr McKenna was commenting on a complaint by an Irish Times reader who had contacted the hospital help-line in relation to the post-mortem on his baby, who died 30 years ago. He said he was amazed to find that the help-line staff could only take details and promise to contact him later.
Dr McKenna said help-line staff could not help people with particular cases because they did not have their records in front of them. The hospital would contact people who inquired with whatever information it found, except for people who specifically asked not to be contacted because they had not told their spouses.
em-ail: pomorain@irish-times.ie