Matter of life and death

Colette Keane talks to Mark Murphy who aims to set up a living donor programme.

GATHERED around a bedside, holding the hand of a loved one in the gloom of a hospital room, a family must make a painful decision amidst overwhelming grief.

The computerised, regular blip of the heart monitor steadily beating out its own rhythm no longer provides any comfort for them. Their husband or wife, father, mother, or child, is clinically dead. And from their death, they must decide whether to give others the chance of life.