State will not sue contaminated blood suppliers

HAEMOPHILIACS have accused the Government of betraying them in not pursuing the US pharmaceutical firms that supplied the State with contaminated blood products.

Imported blood products were responsible for infecting a total of 106 haemophiliacs with HIV and 221 with hepatitis C. There have been 91 deaths.

But the Government has decided against taking legal action against the drug firms, either in the US or Ireland, saying it would be a foolish venture and a waste of taxpayers’ money.

The Irish Haemophilia Society (HIS) said their members would be angry and upset when they learned that commitments given by former Ministers for Health, Brian Cowen and Micheál Martin, to pursue the companies had been broken.

IHS chief executive Brian O’Mahony said their request to see a copy of the Government’s legal advice from both the US and Irish lawyers had been refused. They wanted to see the advice so they could take a considered view of the options now available to the society.

The IHS pointed out that the cost to the State for providing treatment, medical care and compensation for haemophiliacs with HIV and hepatitis C had reached hundreds of millions of euro. It believed that if legal action in the US against the pharmaceutical firms was successful, the Irish taxpayer could recoup all of the costs spent to date.

“We call on the Government to do the right thing to pursue the truth and to recoup these significant sums of money for the Irish taxpayer,” said Mr O’Mahony.

He was also disappointed that the Government declined the offer from a US-based legal firm to take a case in the US against the pharmaceutical companies on a “no foal, no fee” basis if it was allowed to keep a third of any award made because such an arrangement was illegal in Ireland.

Health Minister Mary Harney said it would be dishonest for the State to pursue a legal action that it would have no possibility of winning. She said the Government believed it would be of more benefit to the haemophilia community to concentrate resources on improving services to people with haemophilia.

Ms Harney also ruled out having a new inquiry into the role of US firms in the blood contamination crisis and pointed out that no such commitment had been given by the Government.

“We don’t know which particular products infected which particular people but we do know that a group of products infected a group of citizens and we have the chronology of events. So I don’t know what useful purpose would be served by such an inquiry,” she said.