Watching last Friday's BBC television documentary about the discovery of two preserved human bodies in Irish bogs, Fintan O'Toole was struck by the words of one of the scientists involved.
Prof Valerie Hall stressed that this work was not like handling a shard of ancient pottery or a stone axe-head. A human body, however old, was not just an object of cold scientific interest: "One treats a person like that with great respect and genuine tenderness."
Her words struck me because I had just been reading the report by Dr Deirdre Madden into the handling of the bodies of dead children in Irish hospitals between 1970 and 2000.
The respect and tenderness shown by scientists towards the remains of Clonycavan Man and Old Croghan Man were left outside the room when the church-run and State-funded institutions disposed of those human remains. And the arrogance and insensitivity which characterised this disgraceful saga continues.
The Madden report is itself an act of hurried disposal, burying a gross injustice in obscure ground with a muttered, indifferent ceremony. The mourners - hundreds of Irish parents whose loss of a child has been compounded by the casual mishandling of the dead body - have been told, in effect, to get their awkward grief out of our sight.
From early 1999, after revelations about the retention of the organs of dead children by English hospitals, it became clear that similar practices had been par for the course in Ireland. In England, serious public inquiries were held, and detailed, damning reports have been issued.
In April 2000, the then minister for health, Micheál Martin, announced that there would be a two-stage inquiry here. First, a senior counsel, Anne Dunne, would carry out a private investigation without statutory powers. Her report would be completed in six months and would then go to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health and Children, which would use its full powers to discover documents and compel witnesses. Almost six years later, there has been no Dunne report, and there will be no statutory investigation.
The Madden report will go to the Oireachtas committee, but since the Supreme Court has found that such committees cannot make adverse findings about anyone, the exercise will be largely pointless. A terrible wrong has been done to hundreds of Irish parents and the State has decided that no one has to answer for it.
The Government decided to wind up the Dunne inquiry without publishing the 3,500-page report on practices in three Dublin hospitals which Anne Dunne had submitted to Mary Harney. Dr Deirdre Madden was then given all of the Dunne documentation to read in a period of less than seven months. Her brief effectively precluded her from blaming anyone for what happened. As she puts it herself: "The purpose of this inquiry is to be a fact-finding exercise, not a method of apportioning guilt or blame for what happened in the past."
What happened is, in general terms, plain enough. Hospitals carried out invasive postmortems on the bodies of dead children without getting the informed consent of their parents. In some cases, no consent was sought. In others, parents were approached in the aftermath of a death by a nun, or even a garda, and asked to give verbal consent. At best, a doctor sought verbal consent or presented parents with an extremely minimal form to sign. Parents were not told that they could object to a postmortem or limit it to specific organs.
Even this woefully limited form of consent did not apply, however, to the removal and retention of organs. Brains and hearts were removed and kept on shelves, in a few cases for years, before being thrown in with the rest of the hospital waste and burned. Pituitary glands were removed and sold to pharmaceutical companies. Parents who asked questions were deliberately fobbed off by being told that some "tissue" had been retained. One mother and father, noticing how light the body of their dead baby felt, were told that "babies lose fluid".
When the story began to break in 1999, and parents asked for information, some were told, for example, that "slivers" of tissue had been retained, when in fact the hospital had held on to their baby's major organs. But none of this was anyone's fault. The Madden report simply finds that postmortems were "carried out in Ireland according to best professional and international standards and that no intentional disrespect was shown to the child's body". Dr Madden tells us that it did not occur to doctors that a dead child's heart or brain might have any "emotional significance" for its parents - an astonishing lapse considering that these doctors were both human beings and worked in hospitals owned by churches who practise elaborate rituals of funeral and burial. It was all, apparently, an unfortunate misunderstanding, rooted in a "lack of communication".
So, in the end, how has the State responded to parents whose grief was deepened by an arrogant refusal to tell them what happened to their dead children? By an arrogant refusal to tell them what happened to their dead children.