Ms Doireann O'Mahony:

This is something that has been covered quite extensively in the media over recent months. Certainly, Ann Murphy of the Irish Examiner has covered a great deal about recommendations and families' disappointment with the lack of follow-through. For example, a number of coroners around the country made recommendations that automated external defibrillators, AEDs, be at all Garda stations around the country because, obviously, everyone knows where the Garda stations are. That has not happened. The question was put to An Garda Síochána and the response was the Garda simply does not have the funding for it. This is the situation. The same sound recommendations are being made time and again by coroners but nobody is following up on them. It would be very sensible if we were to follow what is being done in the UK and have force behind the recommendations and have a statutory duty on the coroner to send a report and a duty on the entity or organisation in turn to report back within a specified timeframe. That would give a level of comfort to families as well. My experience is the verdict returned at an inquest is just a piece of paper with a word on it and is meaningless for them. What matters for them is knowing that decent recommendations can be made that can effect change and prevent future deaths.

I wish to comment on another thing before it is glossed over, which is the issue of the local authorities vis-à-visthe Department of Justice. We are all in agreement on the point that coroners have to be independent. However, how can a coroner be independent when he or she is answerable to the local authority? I give the example of Cork city. There are delays there at present and the coroner is at the mercy of the city council for funding, staffing and so forth. I speak from experience. Last year, I represented a widower whose wife and child died in a hospital in Cork. Their inquests were pushed back on a number of occasions. Eventually, they were listed on 30 August which, of course, suited everybody else and all the hospital staff, not to mention the fact this was the widower's son's first day at school. It was adjourned on that occasion again and the coroner said, "I cannot get a courtroom and I cannot get a place to hold the inquest." This is a funding issue. We fought and fought and eventually the coroner secured a facility in a hotel in Cork for three days, so there were three days to have the inquest heard.

The committee members heard at the outset that one of the longest-running inquests took place earlier this year, which ran over 14 days, yet in Cork there was an inquest into two deaths that was confined to three days. It sat with a jury. It started in the morning and ran on well past a time a judge would sit in court and late into the evening on each of the three days. That was very hard for the jury, the lawyers, the coroner and all the witnesses, not least the family members. I do not believe that is right. We cannot just gloss over the fact that local authorities in certain parts of the country and in certain coroner districts have too much power. It is a postcode lottery and one does not get the same treatment in Cork as one might get in Kildare or Dublin. That is simply a fact and it has to be said. Uncomfortable as it is for people to hear and for me to say it, it has to be said.