The parents of a HIV-positive child were not told for nearly two years of the child's infection, it emerged at the tribunal yesterday.
The father of the child, who died of AIDS-related diseases when he was 11, told the tribunal he believed his only son was knowingly infected by contaminated blood products and he wanted to see "heads on a plate" at the end of the inquiry.
He said his son was put on "good clean" blood-clotting agents imported from Switzerland in the early 1980s when he was a baby but was then changed to cryo-precipitate and Factor 8 clotting agents by Harcourt Street Hospital, which said the other treatment was too expensive.
Using the name Martin, he said he was horrified when he discovered that the Factor 8 came from the US, where he had seen people queuing up and "staggering in" to donate blood.
When he became aware in the mid-1980s that an inappropriate number of haemophiliac children were testing HIV-positive in the Republic relative to other Western countries, he was concerned his son might also be infected.
He said his son, who was one of 5 per cent of haemophiliacs for whom the condition was not inherited, was called to St James's Hospital, Dublin, for n HIV test in December 1984, and he assumed the results of the test would be back in days. The family heard nothing and after making several calls were told that if they heard nothing there was nothing to worry about.
When they attended his six-monthly check-up in October 1986, Prof Ian Temperley, former director of the National Haemophilia Treatment Centre, said to his wife: "I see you got on well at your counselling."
Martin and his wife looked at each other and at the doctor. They were "floored". It was the first they knew of their son's HIV infection. "I was told he had been in contact with the HIV virus, and it was nothing at all to worry about. The impression I got was it was the same as the common cold," he said.
The child was fine until 1992, when he developed what was like a TB cough and, as his father put it, "it was all downhill from there". They took him to hospital for another check-up and were told he would be fine. Martin was not happy and asked that the child be X-rayed, which revealed his lungs were in "an awful state".
He was detained in intensive care for a week, went home, developed a very high temperature and was readmitted to hospital for 16 weeks. In May 1993, when it was obvious he was making no progress in hospital, his parents took him home. He was tube-fed by a battery-operated pump in one pocket and had a morphine pump in the other.
"He was so thin you would be afraid to look at him. He was like something out of Auschwitz," he said.
Another witness said his brother was not informed for several years that he was HIV-positive. The witness, who used the pseudonym Owen, said his brother, who died within the last 12 months aged 37, did not find out until 1992 that he was HIV-positive.
He said his brother was tested for the virus at Cork Regional Hospital, where he had received Factor 8, before travelling abroad with his wife in the mid to late 1980s. When he returned home, he did not feel well, was checked out and tested HIV-positive.
Counsel for the hospital put it to him that evidence would be given that every effort was made to contact his brother. Owen said he did not accept this.
He felt badly let down by the hospital. "I can't understand why a person would put something into a person's body knowing it was going to kill. That is exactly what they did," he said.
Owen also has another brother living with hepatitis C who will give evidence later.