More than a third of families asked to donate the organs of relatives for transplant refused consent last year, the Minister for Health and Children said yesterday.
Mr Martin said the refusal rate was 35 per cent last year and 19 per cent the year before. The higher refusal rate, he said, may result from the controversy over organ retention. In all, families consented to organ donation in 71 cases.
He was speaking at the launch of an information leaflet by the Irish Kidney Association to mark National Donor Week to begin next Saturday.
Donations may also be affected by a reluctance on the part of some doctors to seek organs for transplant because of the organ retention controversy, the national transplant co-ordinator told The Irish Times.
Ms Phyllis Cunningham, who is based at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, said offers of organs for transplant have been arriving at a slower rate. So far this year, 15 donors have been notified to the national centre.
Some weeks ago a Co Meath baby died in a London hospital while awaiting a liver transplant. The hospital said at the time that the organ retention controversy in the UK had affected donations there.
Ms Cunningham said she was concerned that medical staff might not be approaching families of people who have died in Intensive Care Units to ask them to consider organ donation.
She wanted to emphasise, she said, "that there is absolutely no connection, no similarity" between organ donation and organ retention.
This message is likely to be repeated during organ donor week. Organs for retention were removed at post-mortems, without the knowledge of relatives, under circumstances which are now the subject of an official inquiry.
Organs for donation are removed only with the consent of the family and only if there is a patient awaiting the organ. Ms Cunningham said organs were offered in the first instance to hospitals in Ireland and if there was nobody awaiting a transplant for a particular organ, hospitals in the UK were notified.
Irish Kidney Association website: http://www.ika.ie