The Minister of State at the Department of Justice, Ms Mary Wallace, made what may qualify as the understatement of the year when she opened the 27th Congress of the International Academy of Legal Medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin this week. The State, she modestly averred, had not for many years given forensic pathology the attention it deserved. She need have looked no further than files of newspaper cuttings over the past three decades for evidence to support her words, and much of that evidence has come from the man closest to the centre of the medical investigation of deaths in suspicious circumstances - the State Pathologist, Dr John Harbison.
In his numerous complaints about inadequate resources, or his frequent requests for State assistance in carrying out his duties, Dr Harbison has always been straightforward rather than strident. His quest has been simple and his task fundamental. His desire is merely to enable the State to detect murderers and bring them to justice, yet he has gone on record more than once to point out that this may be one of the states in the world where the would-be murderer might most easily get away with it. Yet most of his requests and complaints have gone unheard or unheeded by successive governments.
His small and lonely office remains in an administrative limbo between the Department of Health and the Department of Justice, between the Attorney General's office and the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. The State Pathologist continues to work on his own with no formal deputies or assistants. The service, when he is out of his office, has to be provided by whichever pathologist Dr Harbison can find who is sufficiently qualified in forensic pathology to cover for him. More recently he has been able to rely, to a certain geographic extent, on another forensic pathologist designated as his acting deputy.
But he needs a great deal more than that. The State needs a great deal more than that if it is to retain any credibility in its detection and conviction of murderers. That no government has implemented even the more modest of Dr Harbison's requests or proposals is a disgrace to the body politic in a State which has been subjected to paramilitary violence and a formidable growth in organised crime. That the bloodiest of violence might go unpunished because of the lack of an adequate national distribution of forensic medical resources, scarcely bears contemplation.
There is urgent need of postgraduate medical training for those doctors who might choose to undertake some forensic work, and there is need of some incentive to encourage more adequately trained doctors to work more closely with the Garda and the judicial system. There is need, at the very least, to ensure that suitably trained doctors will be available in every region of the country to undertake informed and speedy examinations of murder scenes when a fully qualified forensic pathologist is not available to do so. The appointment of a deputy for the State Pathologist is now said to be imminent, but an assistant, at least, is also required. The State must no longer exploit the great personal commitment and the high professional calibre of its currently lone provider. Dr Harbison more than deserves the help he needs, and all citizens deserve reassurance that forensic services are adequate to meet the demands made upon them.