Sir, – Almost 20 years ago I moved to Australia to work for a few years. This entailed a fair bit of organising – vacating and renting my home, sorting out visas, putting stuff in storage and shipping other possessions to an, as yet unknown, address. I was astonished when, less than a month after arriving in Melbourne I received a letter from Ireland to my new residence informing me that I’d been taken off our electoral register.
It was incredible how efficient our system was in managing what our leaders really care about – that is, the mechanics of getting elected.
This occurs to me reading Fintan O’Toole’s article on the delayed Human Tissue Bill (“Collective laziness of Irish legislators causes real suffering”, Opinion & Analysis, November 8th).
It is not limited in scope to the “parents of dead babies”, whom he mentions, though surely that matter alone warrants great focus and urgency. It will also provide a much needed legislative basis for organ transplantation, and for much of the communication and conduct around that most sensitive (as well as logistically challenging) of medical processes. There are hundreds of patients on waiting lists for organs at any one time.
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I’m not at all convinced that, as Fintan O’Toole suggests, the handling of the organs of deceased children constitutes an “indictment of attitudes within the medical profession”. The degree to which practising physicians are involved in, or even aware of, the management export of “clinical waste” is minuscule, I would suggest. Most are astonished when scandals of this nature are reported. But it would be helpful if clear and binding legislation on the topic was afforded the same priority as electoral politics by our representatives. On the latter subject, there isn’t much “laziness” in evidence. – Yours, etc,
BRIAN O’BRIEN,
Kinsale,
Co Cork.