Hospital feared pathology facility would upset patients
The then-State Pathologist Professor John Harbison had to assure the hospital authorities that only samples and specimens, and not bodies, were delivered to his office. Postmortems on bodies are usually carried out in Dublin in the city morgue, or nationwide in hospital mortuaries.
After years of promises to Professor Harbison about providing him with suitable facilities, the Department of Justice finally entered into negotiations with Beaumont in 1996 to locate a pathology office on the hospital grounds.
The discussions continued until 1999, but the department abandoned the proposal in 2000.
Beaumont’s concerns came to light yesterday in an internal departmental memo which was released under the Freedom of Information Act.
“The location of the state pathology service on the hospital grounds was a cause of concern to the authorities there because they considered that it might create the wrong impression with patients and visitors,” said the memo, written in August 2000. “For this reason, sign-posting to the facility would have to be discrete.”
Professor Harbison had to reassure the hospital authorities that samples and not bodies are delivered to the pathology service and that visitors to the service, in virtually all cases, are gardaí out of uniform, attending for consultations.
The fact that the pathology service “was to be more or less ‘hidden away’ would neither be conducive to good morale in the pathology service nor reflect its importance as a vital support to the gardaí in resolving investigations in relation to murders and incidents of death in suspicious circumstances.”
It was one of the reasons cited in the memo as to why the proposal was “less than ideal”.
Others included the fact that the site on the hospital grounds was too small, and there was insufficient car-parking space.
Security was also a factor.
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