SAND WAS used to make up the weight of deceased children after some of their organs were removed during post mortem examinations in the past, it has emerged.
The revelation came yesterday in a section of the Dunne Post Mortem Inquiry report released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) to Parents for Justice, the organisation which represents parents of children whose organs were retained without consent in Irish hospitals from the 1970s up to the year 2000.
Charlotte Yeats of Parents for Justice said she was shocked at the revelation.
"This was the first time we heard this . . . we were always aware that maybe tissue and cotton wool were used to pad out the child's body so that it would look OK for the parent, but this is the very first time we've heard sand being mentioned and that was a deliberate attempt by the hospitals to deceive parents as far as we are concerned," she said.
The report said the sand was placed in the heads of babies and small children "as packing material".
The report also revealed that most of the organs removed in one particular children's hospital were left in a storage shed and were allowed to disintegrate and lose their value.
"They weren't able to be used for anything so it looks as if parents have buried their child incomplete but nobody has benefited from this at all," Ms Yeats told RTÉ News.
The report also found that in some cases the disposal of organs was crude and insensitive.
It also said new consent procedures introduced by hospitals following the controversy were "brutal" and "fundamentally flawed".
The organ retention inquiry, headed by senior counsel Anne Dunne, began in 2000 following revelations that hospitals had retained the organs of deceased patients without consent for post-mortem examinations. The inquiry continued for five years until the government closed it down in March 2005. At that stage the inquiry had cost about €13 million - about six times the original estimate.
Ms Dunne handed over the information she had gathered to the Department of Health, and UCC law lecturer Dr Deirdre Madden was asked in May 2005 to complete a report based on the documentation. Her report was subsequently published.
Parents for Justice received an edited version of the executive summary of the Dunne inquiry report under the Freedom of Information Act in 2006 but they had to wait until yesterday to get the full executive summary. The new data released included 27 pages of findings and recommendations not previously published.
Ms Yeats said the impression had previously been given that Ms Dunne had made no findings.
"We feel that Anne Dunne has been done an injustice by the Department of Health and the HSE because they always created the impression that she had made no findings or recommendations but now that we've had a chance to read this we find Ms Dunne's recommendations far stronger, more specific and more acceptable than Dr Madden's recommendations which were published in January 2006," she said.
Ms Yeats added that people had gone to serious lengths to stop the full report being released and it was ironic that it came within weeks of the HSE informing Parents for Justice it would be getting no funding for 2008 even though it now had to deal with more concerned families following the release of the new information.
She said Parents for Justice, which is to make a presentation to the Oireachtas health committee today, would be seeking a statutory inquiry .