Ms Oonagh Buckley:

There are challenges around this and they became particularly difficult during the pandemic because of the Covid-19 precautions that had to be brought to bear. Dublin also became the recipient of a lot of bodies where Covid-19 precautions had to take place so it took a bigger hit nationally, if I can put it that way, which was really unfortunate. As the Deputy said, one is always conscious of the families involved. One thing involved here is that Covid-19 deaths are natural deaths so unless there was another reason for a post-mortem they would not necessarily have undergone that.

The other issue with this, and the Secretary General has mentioned this a few times, is that there are very specialist skills associated with doing post-mortems and so forth. It is constantly a challenge to recruit and have those skills in place to facilitate the mortuary service. The other issue is that some hospitals offer the service and depending on whether the hospitals are in a position to offer the service, that can increase or decrease the pressure on the Dublin mortuary. We had quite a significant issue in the last few weeks where a couple of hospitals had to stand down, for reasons pertaining to themselves, and the mortuary then took the hit. At one point, we were up to a delay of two weeks in post-mortems. I am pleased to tell the Deputy that as of yesterday, when I was briefed on the matter, we had only nine post-mortems outstanding. Effectively, there is currently no backlog of post-mortems in the Dublin mortuary.

We have a specialist unit now that is concentrating on the coronial service and the mortuary service. A feature of the justice plan for this year is that we intend to look at the overall structure of the system to see how it needs to be structured for the future. Our coronial service was last properly overhauled in 1846, so we probably need to have a look at it. That is very much in our plans for the future. However, at the same time, I have a dedicated and excellent team working on making sure that the current service is maintained and supporting the Dublin coroner, who is independent, in doing her important work.