Professor Denis Cusack

A service only two to three days, and my colleague, Coroner John Goff in Waterford, has spoken about this.

It is far more costly than it would be to have...

Irish-based pathologists.

And there are also differences in terms of the type of services in terms of looking at tissues and looking at poisons and medicines and toxicology.

So whilst it's a temporary fix, it's not going to be the solution.

And also we now have, as I said, outside of Dublin, we have 10 of the 31 districts with issues about post-mortem facilities.

And this impacts directly on families.

Well, they could be facing months or years.

Now, in fairness, some of the inquests cannot be held, if I just go to that, until, say, a criminal process, if there's been an assault causing death or a road traffic crash causing death.

But the postmortem service, as I said, we have about 6,000 postmortems.

And about 3,500 turn out to be natural causes.

So we also have people waiting months, three to six months, and maybe more, before they can get a death certificate from the coroner.

And of course, this means they can't deal with probate.

It's already a distressing issue for families.

So whether it's a natural or unnatural causes, there are needs for families to be able to deal with all of the sad practicalities

of wills and probate and so on.

And this is why the reforms, there was a consultation in 2024 with a report from the Department of Justice and a heads of bill that is leading to reforming legislation was meant to be brought before the government at the latest last year.

We're still awaiting it, although from contacts in the department, we know in the Coroner's Council

that the minister and the officials are working on this, but it's very dire need to look at structures, to have a central office with the chief coroner, looking at standards, addressing some of these issues about postmortems and toxicology.

And it just happens that coincidentally at a forensic meeting, speaking to you from an international forensic meeting abroad, and there are loads of ideas here, and one of them, if you