Professor Denis Cusack

Good morning, David.

It is indeed, and it's very worrying.

Just to put it in context, we had about 32,000 deaths last year, and of those, about 23,000 were reported to the coroners, and about 6,000 post-mortems were directed by coroners, 2,500 of which went to inquests.

And of those 6,000 post-mortem examinations, 95% are carried out by hospital-based pathologists who have an interest and expertise in post-mortem examination, trying to ascertain the cause of death and reporting to the coroner.

And this topic came up surprisingly in the

Joint Europtics Committee and Transport, which I spoke to them just the week before last about road traffic crashes, which are obviously an important smaller number of deaths.

And there were quite concerns about delays for families in the process and the facilities.

So as you've said, we have a shortage of pathologists.

In the southeast, it's affecting Wexford, Waterford, Carlow, Kilkenny, Tipperary.

It is spreading now to Limerick and Clare.

and also Kildare.

And there are issues with mortuary facilities in Kildare, Cork and Kerry.

And Cork and Kerry are having to take the workload of autopsies from some other counties.

And there's also been some ongoing difficulties in Dublin.

And it has been a helpful solution, and we have to be grateful to our colleague pathologists in the UK and the Department of Justice for this temporary measure.

But it's inefficient.

It means the pathologists from the UK are flying over, spending two to three days.

And by the way, the University Hospital in Waterford, ironically,

has been updated with a lot of money spent on it, and now we have no pathologists to do the post-mortem service because of the pressures on pathologists in diagnostic services.

So we have an inefficient answer.