It is clear by now that we no longer have a controversy about the retention of organs by hospitals after post-mortems on children and adults.
What we have is a widening series of revelations about what happened to the remains of people who died in hospitals and even about the purposes to which human tissue, such as the placenta, was put.
But while the issues are, in many respects, different, there is one thread which runs through them all. This is about the denial of information.
It is common enough to hear these days that such and such a thing was "the practice" in hospitals at the time. What is left out of the reckoning is that the public did not know about the practice - and that if it had, the practice might have been very different.
At last count, five issues had arisen, all of which are in danger of being seen as one single issue, though they are very different.
The original issue was the retention of organs after post-mortems for research and teaching purposes. It seems fair to say that this practice is generally seen as reasonable provided the consent of next-of-kin is obtained. Information was the crucial missing factor here.
The second issue is the provision of pituitary glands to a pharmaceutical company, without parents' consent, for research on a growth hormone. This, again, may be seen as a reasonable thing to do as it could be beneficial to children of short stature. But again the consent was not sought which, in many ways, is the same as saying the information was not given about what was going on.
A third issue concerns the sale by some maternity hospitals of placentas to companies engaged in the manufacture of cosmetics. We hear, as if in some futuristic (though not futuristic at all) nightmare, of companies placing fridges outside the doors of maternity wards for the storage of the placentas in question. This practice may be grotesque or financially prudent depending on one's point of view but it was hidden. We do not know whether mothers would have objected to the practice at the time because nobody told them about it.
Of a different order is the revelation by St James's Hospital that foetuses under 28 weeks' gestation were "dealt with by a process of special incineration similar to cremation". The hospital goes on to say that during the early 1980s the recognition became widespread that women who suffered a miscarriage or stillbirth needed special support and counselling. In other words, public attitudes changed and hospitals changed with them. That is fair enough. But had the public known what happened to foetuses under 28 weeks' gestation, one wonders if attitudes and practice would have changed earlier.
Of a still different order again is the possibility that babies who died at the hospital were placed for burial at the feet of adults in their coffins. That this may have happened prior to 1980 is being investigated by its chief executive. It seems fair to assume that the adults were people without relatives - who might want a wake and an open coffin - who were being buried by the Eastern Health Board; and that the babies had been born to people lacking the capacity, financially or otherwise, to bury them. So perhaps what was done - if it happened at all - was done as an act of kindness or respect to the baby who had died.
But that is guesswork. We do not have the information and if the practice had been known about at the time, it is very likely indeed that it would have been stopped.
In all of these issues, and in whatever remains to be found out, it is important that we keep one thing in perspective: so far as we know, the people engaged in all these practices were reasonably principled, decent members of society, as were, and are, the families who are now so aggrieved.
What needs to come out of this is the conviction that telling people about what is going on, however inconvenient it may be to do so, provides the best assurance we can have that we are doing the right thing.
Email: pomorain@irish-times.ie