Mr. Gerry Edwards:

I will take the last question first and then come back to the issue of dignity. I felt useless when we got the diagnosis. We went in for the scan together and we were looking at crèches near work. I was thinking that if we went for this particular crèche, I would be able to pop up during my lunch breaks. I would be "Super Dad" and it would all be wonderful. For both of us, everything stopped. My wife, Gaye, was the one who was pregnant. She was the one who could feel Joshua moving inside her. She was the one going through all that physical thing. As dads, we are sort of bystanders. I think I felt I did not have a function. There was not a job that I could do to fix anything. I could not make anything better. I got to make all the phone calls. I got to do things like pick out the Golden Pages and try to find phone numbers in London and explain to strangers what was happening.

Since we were at 20 weeks, we could go to a hospital - we did not know any hospitals in England. I was trying to support Gaye as best I could. I could not, and did not, deal with any grief at the time because I had things to do. I had to be the person who did practical things - make appointments, drive, all of that stuff. At the end, I had to take Gaye away from her baby, our baby. He was delivered in Belfast and we did not know that one could bring a baby home. I thought I would have to smuggle my dead son back to try to have a funeral. I had visions of climbing over a cemetery wall with a shovel. I knew that I could not do that so we had to leave him behind for cremation and I had to take Gaye away from him. I did not feel like a good husband or father at that time. That stuck with me for a long time afterwards.

On dignity, me, my wife and our son were treated with the utmost dignity abroad; we felt we were treated like outcasts here. We did not get to attend our son's cremation. We did not know when it was; we just got a courier package at our door within a couple of weeks of his death. We signed for him like one would any Amazon delivery. The thought that our son was cremated alone troubled us for a long time. It really haunted us that we were not there. Years later, I learned that the pathologist from the hospital travels to the crematorium with the babies that are left in her care. She takes them in her car and she sits with them while they are cremated so they are not alone. I learned that about ten years after he died and we cried again then because we saw that there were people who did not know us from a bar of soap and cared about us and our baby enough to do that in a completely unsung way. It just made us more angry at how we had felt abandoned by Ireland at the time.