Sir, - Vincent Browne (Opinion, April 19th) claimed that I acknowledged that "drugs experiments have been carried out on mental patients without their consent". The item that Mr Browne referred to is an interview he carried out with me on his radio programme towards the end of last year.
I have consulted the transcript of that interview and established that, in response to a phone-in statement that clinical trials of drugs were being carried out on patients in psychiatric hospitals without their consent, I said that I had no knowledge that such was the case and that drug trials, under the provisions of Section 4 of the Control of Clinical Trials Act, 1987 and as amended 1990, can take place only with the permission of the Minister for Health and Children as advised by the Irish Medicines Board and indicated that, given this statutory requirement, it was inherently unlikely that the caller's claim could be true.
I hardly think that this constitutes the "acknowledgment" which Mr Browne claims I made on his programme. - Yours, etc.,
Dr Dermot Walsh, Inspectorate of Mental Hospitals, Hawkins House, Hawkins Street, Dublin 2.