Cathal Morrow spent his 20s watching his father, Michael, become “increasingly erratic” and eventually losing his mind. “I was working in Cardiff at the time,” Cathal, now 58, remembers. “He phoned me up at work – basically he had gone completely mad, so I went back to London where my parents lived.
My mother was dreadfully upset and tearful; my father had pushed her to the limit and beyond. “It was an untenable and horrendous situation. I was fully aware that my father was dying; there was no specific reason for me to think this other than I just knew.
” Only after some time in hospital did medics tell the family that Michael had hepatitis C. Six months later he died in 1994 at the Royal Free Hospital in London, aged 64. Michael Morrow, a musician from south Dublin, had become the latest victim in what has been the biggest treatment scandal in NHS history.
He was born with haemophilia, a medical condition in which the ability of the blood to clot is severely reduced, causing the sufferer to bleed severely from even a slight injury, and received monthly blood transfusions from an early age. The Infected Blood Inquiry report, published on Monday , found that politicians, medics and civil servants were all responsible for a cover-up over the use of contaminated blood products on groups of patients, including Michael, from the late 70s until 1990. Some 3,000 people have already died and thousands more have been left with lifelong ill-health as a result of being in.