Coroners’ Society annual conference

Coroners’ Society of Ireland held its annual conference in Ennis last week, where more than a third of the country’s coroners were in attendance. In addition, Minister for Justice Alan Shatter spoke at the gala dinner.
County Clare’s coroner, Isobel O’Dea, handed over the reigns to Limerick City coroner Tony Casey as the Coroners’ Society of Ireland’s new president.
A vast array of topics were discussed at the conference, from craniofacial analysis and reconstruction to the coroner in fiction and from those who died during the construction of the Titanic to the need for protection of older people.
“The range of the talks were educational, the bit about the Titanic was fantastic. The feedback was positive. Minister Alan Shatter gave a speech at the conference and this was the first time he was at the conference since 2004. It was great he attended and it gave an opportunity for the coroners to have an informal but informative chat with him,” Ms O’Dea said. 
Caroline Wilkinson, professor of craniofacial indentification at the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification at the University of Dundee, Scotland, spoke about the various techniques the centre uses to establish identification.
She said their service comes into play when all other aspects of identification are lacking, where there are no dental records, visual recognition or otherwise. In particular, the work is successful in identifying those found in disaster zones. She explained that as part of the Asian tsunami, 10% were wrongly identified.
One of the methods used is where the skull is superimposed with photographs of a person to see if there are differences or similar markers. This is done using computers.It is a legally accepted form of facial identification but one that requires multiple images of the person, with different characteristics showing.
She outlined the controversy surrounding the killing of notorious bank robber John Dillinger in the 1930s as to whether the FBI had actually shot and killed Dillinger. She demonstrated the technique using a variety of pictures of Dillinger and established that the FBI had, in fact, got the right man.
Ms Wilkinson also spoke of some of the challenges she faces, most significantly, if there is a lack of information regarding a person’s BMI or lifestyle. She illustrated this in her presentation by showing how a facial reconstruction might be done on the approximation that a person is of a certain age and weight but for instance if a person was a heroin addict, this would have a huge effect on their appearance. 
John Leckey, senior coroner, Northern Ireland, also gave a talk at the conference, entitled Titanic, the Coronial Experience. In it, he remembered those to have died while making the Titanic and how far health and safety in the workplace has come. 
‘He’s away to the yard’ was how shipyard workers and their families referred to a man dying on the job in the shipyard, he said. The first to die in the building of Titanic was Samuel Joseph Scott, aged 15, following a fall from a ladder on the staging of the ship.
According to Mr Leckey, many of the causes of the shipyard deaths were due to falls from staging, falling timber, being crushed by iron plates and travelling cranes. He highlighted that there were no hard hats or goggles being worn at the time and during the construction of Olympic and Titanic 450 men were injured and 17 died. On Titanic, there were 254 recorded accidents, of which 28 were classified as severe and eight were fatal.