A leading forensic researcher has called for legislation regulating the coroners' service to be updated immediately to allow more detailed analysis of fatal road crash data.
Dr Cliona McGovern, who works in UCD's department of forensic medicine, says coroners'reports could provide vital data on car crashes "that could save lives" but this information is not being collated because the service is so out of date."
Calling for a national database of coroners' files to aid research, McGovern said the data available from these files could provide invaluable information on the role played by speeding, drink, road conditions and possibly disguised suicides in fatal single vehicle crashes.
"It's an area that needs to be studied," she said. "What this country badly needs is a national database of coroners' data, particularly for road victims.
There is information in the reports that could save other lives, but it's not accessible." Coroners work under the 1962 Coroners Act in a system which McGovern says is hopelessly ill-suited to 21st-century
Ireland. "For example, for historical reasons there are four coroners in Donegal but only two for Dublin," she says. McGovern sat on the Coroners Review Group which reported to the Minister for Justice
in 2000 on reforms. A spokesman for the Department said new legislation was being drawn up and that the Minister, Michael McDowell, hopes to present it to Cabinet before March 31st.
McDowell has not decided whether coroners should be full or part-time. In a recent speech he suggested that a full-time service would "ensure the optimum tracking mechanism in the reporting and possible investigation of death".
According to McGovern, the majority of single-vehicle crash files reveal young men dying late at night on secondary roads with speed or drink often involved. But a more detailed assessment of single-vehicle crashes, which resulted in 138 of the 379 killed on the roads last year, is needed to understand other contributing factors and for that the information in the coroners' files is required.
McGovern said disguised suicides may also be a factor in single-vehicle crashes although quantifying this is very difficult. Her study of over 100 coroners' reports into single-vehicle crashes from Co Kildare over the past 11 years suggested "only one case where somebody has mentioned that he was going to take the car and kill himself."
She added this did not rule out the possibility that there could have been more, adding that the area needs research.
The Central Statistics Office made four entries under "Suicide and self-inflicted injury - Crashing of Motor Vehicle" between 1999 and 2003.
McGovern also suggested the method of reporting whether a fatal crash was a suicide contributes to the confusion. "When a verdict of suicide is brought in by the coroner at inquest, a CSO form has to be filled out by gardaí," she said. "It's this form which will record if it's a suicide, not what the coroner said at the inquest. Often we have a discrepancy . . . between a coroner's verdict of, let's say, accidental death, and gardaí would often have a reason to disagree.
"Some coroners around the country are reluctant to bring in a suicide verdict for social reasons.There is still a huge stigma on a verdict of suicide." An international study in 2003 by the accident research
centre at Australia's Monash University suggested that "between one and seven per cent of driver fatalities have been noted as possible suicides".
It added that "current statistics may underestimate the incidence of these deaths." This suggests that most open verdict cases are in fact unidentified suicide cases, says the Monash report. It also suggested that research in Britain indicated that many open coroner's verdicts could actually be unidentified suicides. Calling for further research into the area, Dr McGovern says under the current system the only way to know for sure that it was suicide is if the person leaves a note.
"That's the only way we have of knowing." Until coroners' files and crash reports are complied in a database "you can't discount the possibility that the person fell asleep at the wheel," she says.
"You can't discount the possibility that an animal ran across the road or that there was a person on the road and or they were distracted and crashed."
