Former blood bank officials to stand trial

TWO former senior blood bank officials are to stand trial accused of infecting women with hepatitis C in an unprecedented action which could have implications for other investigations into contaminated blood products.

Detectives from the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation arrested Dr Terry Walsh and Cecily Cunningham at their homes in Dublin yesterday, before bringing them before the district court on charges relating to the infection of seven named women between 1977 and 1992.

Dr Walsh, aged 61, of Hollypark Avenue, Blackrock, Co Dublin, and Ms Cunningham, aged 62, of Hollybrook Road, Clontarf, Dublin 3, were charged under Section 23 of the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act. A piece of legislation rarely used in modern times, it accuses them of administering, or causing to be administered, a “destructive or noxious thing“, thereby causing grievous bodily harm, and carries a possible prison sentence of up to ten years.

The court heard they were arrested at 7.45am yesterday morning and that neither made any reply to the charges read out to them. They were remanded on their own bail to appear before the court again on September 24 next.

Their arrests followed a two-and-a-half-year investigation by the NBCI and a lengthy consideration of the case by the Director of Public Prosecutions following the findings of the Finlay Tribunal which reported in 1997.

The tribunal was set up to inquire into how some 1,200 women who received the blood product, Anti-D, from the then Blood Transfusion Services Board (BTSB) during their pregnancies, came to be infected with hepatitis C.

Dr Walsh held the posts of senior medical officer, assistant director and chief medical consultant at the BTSB between 1969 and his retirement in 1995, while Ms Cunningham joined the board as a technician from 1968 and worked as principal biochemist from 1974. She left the BTSB in recent years and does not work for its replacement, the Irish Blood Transfusion Service.

Positive Action, a support and lobby group for women infected with hepatitis C, welcomed the DPP’s decision to press charges, action it has been demanding since 1995.

A investigation is expected to be announced before the end of the year into the infection of around 150 other women who fell outside the remit of the Finlay Tribunal.

The probe will come under the new inquiry system announced by Justice Minster Michael

McDowell recently in his Commissions of Investigation Bill.

A second tribunal report, that of the Lindsay Tribunal into the infection of haemophiliacs with hepatitis C and HIV, was sent to the DPP late last year to consider possible grounds for prosecution.