A SENIOR Department of Health official told the tribunal of inquiry he was shocked by the Blood Transfusion Service Board's document which revealed the hepatitis C crisis on February 17th, 1994, after he attended the funeral of a colleague that morning.
Mr Donal Devitt, assistant secretary at the Department's secondary care (acute hospitals) division, said following the death of a fellow assistant secretary, the discussion at the funeral was about "the types of pressures on officials".
"To go back into the Department and to start going back to work, and to be hit with this formal eight page report ... it was quite shocking."
His mind had been detached from work in the two days prior to that and there had been a back up of correspondence, including a memo from Dr Rosemary Boothman, a Department medical consultant on the board of the Blood Transfusion Service Board (BTSB). The memo made sense in the context of the BTSB report.
Replying to Mr Paul Gallagher SC for the BTSB, Mr Devitt said he did not recall being told by Dr Boothman that she was instructed on January 21st, 1994, by Dr Terry Walsh, the then BTSB national director, to examine current anti D stocks.
Mr Gallagher said there was a meeting between the National Drugs Advisory Board and the BTSB on February 15th, where it was indicated that replacement anti D was being imported from Canada.
Mr Devitt said he understood there was contact but added that at the February 17th meeting he was frightened at the "dodging and weaving" on the BTSB's part.
At that meeting, which included Ms Dolores Moran, then a higher executive officer, they were told they were worrying too much over possible contamination of blood products in 1989-91, which later proved to be true.
"What was very worrying on the 17th was that there was no specific reference - good, bad or indifferent - to there being a problem other than in relation to the 1976 problem," he said.
On the subsequent "Targeted Look Back Programme", where recipients of the anti D product would be traced through the records, Mr Devitt said commitments by the BTSB that "things would be done by certain times" were not achieved by September 1994.
He agreed with counsel for the Department, Mr John Coughlan, that the BTSB not having physically collected its existing anti D stocks subsequently became an issue when it emerged that two doses of that stock were administered, one at a nursing home.
"They were assuring us of a total recall. The first incident that came up that a dose had been administered in July was the Marian home in Limerick," he said.