Article from the Sept. 2006 issue of the Socialist
newspaper of the Socialist Party, Irish section of the CWI

Organ retention scandal

By Councillor Mick Barry

OUR LADY’S Hospital in Crumlin, Dublin, exported body organs from dead patients to hospitals in the UK without permission from relatives, according to information released under the Freedom of Information Act in August.

Hospital authorities had made denials in the past to families that this practice had ever taken place. Now the National Maternity Hospital is challenging a direction from the state's Information Commissioner to release documents concerning organ retention. Why? What have they got to hide?

More than 14,000 pituatary glands from dead patients, including children, were retained without permission from relatives by Irish hospitals in the 1970s and 80s. Some of these were sold at a nominal price to pharmaceutical companies for research into human growth hormone. Two non-statutory enquiries have condemned the medical profession for the practice and have said that there was no malice intended. But both the Dunne and the Madden enquiries left many questions unanswered.

The Socialist Party supports the demand advanced by the Parents for Justice group that there be a full statutory enquiry into this scandal.

Cork-based Parents for Justice activist Donie Murphy, whose daughter Sharon died aged seven months and had her brain incinerated without her parents’ knowledge says: "I don't trust this government. A lot of things are being covered up. We want justice and a full statutory enquiry to get to the bottom of all that has gone on."