Hospital Services Seanad Éireann — 2026-03-18 ============================================================ Robbie Gallagher (FF), Labour Panel Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. He is welcome to the House. I would like to discuss an issue about which a number of grieving families have contacted me recently. It is the delay in their ability to hold the funerals of their loved ones due to a hold-up in carrying out post mortems in a number of counties throughout the country. The problem can become even more acute at weekends and on bank holidays. As I am sure the Minister of State can appreciate, the delays in getting loved ones returned to them add another layer of hardship on families who have just lost loved ones. Several hospitals across the country no longer provide the service due to a shortage of pathologists and the demand of daily diagnostic services. I understand that approximately 6,000 post mortems are carried out annually in this country. They are ordered after a sudden, unexplained, violent or unnatural death. The service is reliant on consultant pathologists, who are employed in hospitals to step in to undertake coroner-directed post mortems, but a growing number of pathologists are opting out of the service for various reasons, including their own hospital workload, which does not allow them the time to opt in, adversarial legal questioning at inquests, and a fee of approximately €320, which has not changed for over 20 years. A critical lack of pathologists nationwide has forced a reliance on locum doctors, some of whom are being flown in from the UK to manage the workload at a substantially higher cost and a higher fee than Irish-based specialists would expect to get for carrying out the procedure. I understand there are clear recruitment challenges for the Office of the State Pathologist, with unsuccessful competitions for senior positions, despite increased demand from the criminal justice system. It would appear that we have a problem in certain parts of the country. I fully understand that this is not an issue in many parts of the country, but in some it has become a bigger issue. It is, unfortunately, down to a lack of pathologists able to do the job. It is an issue that needs to be addressed. When families are grieving a loved one, they are in an emotional state to begin with. If there is delay in the family getting the loved one's remains back for the wake and funeral, it adds another layer to a very vulnerable family. I hope the Minister of State will be able to outline to me what plans the Government has to address the shortage of pathologists, which seems to be very acute in certain parts of the country. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-03-18/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:44+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-03-18