Parents hit out at €7.7m paid to organ inquiry team

IT is obscene the head of Dunne Inquiry into Organ Retention and her senior legal team were each paid €1,902 a day for a job that they never completed, campaign group Parents for Justice (PFJ) said yesterday.

Legal fees totalling €7.7 million — paid by the State to the inquiry chair, Anne Dunne and her two senior legal experts — were revealed during an examination by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of the Comptroller and Auditor General’s (C&AG) report on the post-mortem inquiry.

PFJ, which represents more than 1,000 families who had the organs of their loved ones retained without their knowledge or consent, said the Government should have pulled the plug on the €20m-plus inquiry as soon as it became apparent it was a complete waste of taxpayer’s money.

PFJ withdrew from the inquiry in October 2002, when the cost had already run to €5.4m, because they knew the inquiry was failing to do its job.

“We know nothing more than we did seven years ago when the inquiry was established,” said PFJ spokesperson Charlotte Yeates.

The campaign group is still pushing for a full, statutory public inquiry and has been seeking to discuss the issue with Health Minister Mary Harney since last August, without success.

The Dunne Inquiry, which began its work in March 2001, was wound up by the Government in March 2005. Two months later the Government appointed legal expert Deirdre Madden to prepare a report on key issues relating to post-mortem practices and procedures by December 2005.

C&AG John Purcell, in his report, said alarm bells about the ability of the Dunne Inquiry to do its work would have rung much sooner if it was obliged to produce progress reports. He pointed out that Ms Madden’s report, which cost €460,000, was presented to Ms Harney on the due date.

The inquiry, established by the then Health Minister Micheál Martin in February 2000, only got under way in March 2001. It took almost a year to obtain accommodation for the inquiry and difficulties were experienced in getting suitable staff.

PAC chair Michael Noonan (FG) asked the secretary general of the Department of Health, Michael Scanlon, why the inquiry team still got paid even though they failed to produce a report.

Mr Scanlon said the agreement was that they would be paid a daily fee but that did not mean that they were obliged to produce a product at the end of it.

Mr Noonan said: “Isn’t it like that if you pay for a house and all that’s on the site is a couple of thousand blocks, a couple of loads of gravel, timbers for the roof and slates?”

Mr Scanlon said that he agreed with Mr Noonan that the way the Dunne Inquiry had been set up was not the way he personally would manage a house-building project.