Mr. Michael Conroy:

At present, living donors in Ireland can donate a kidney to a relative or a person they know well. They cannot give a kidney up for sharing into a pool. In the general scheme, it is proposed that provision will be made for non-directed altruistic kidney donation. This is where a donation is to be made into a transplant pool. There is no direction such as, "I am not giving it to my brother" or "I am not giving it to my wife". The donor is just putting it into the pool for the common good. In this situation, the donor cannot specify the recipient's race, gender or sexual orientation and, therefore, the donor makes the donation as an altruistic action. While everybody around this table is in favour of increasing organ donation and transplantation, we want to ensure we are not unduly hasty in taking organs. An independent panel, which will include psychologists, ethicists and so on, is being set up to improve such donations such that a potential candidate would in the first instance interact with, say, Beaumont Hospital if he or she thought there was a potential there. If things were going in the right direction, the matter would be referred to the panel. The panel would then go through a process to ensure there was no pressure of any kind on the donor and that he or she was in good physical and mental health. These are just safeguards to protect the donor in these situations. Such a process has been used extensively in other countries, including Northern Ireland, which has a successful living kidney donor programme. This will bring us into line with the those countries. We hope it has the potential to increase the number of living donors. We just want to ensure that it is done properly and that no impression is given of pressuring anybody to give-----