OPPOSITION parliamentarians have criticised the Government for not including funds for a public morgue in the 2014/15 budget, claiming that it is fuelling the growth of “suitcase undertakers” as well as endangering public health.

“[With a] country of Jamaica’s size, development and level of homicides, we need to put it back on the national agenda,” Opposition spokesman on national security Derrick Smith insisted, after Security Minister Peter Bunting admitted that allocations for the construction of the morgue were not included in the estimates for the past two years.

Bunting explained that the cost of constructing a national morgue had grown beyond the Government’s ability to finance it. He said that the last costing he had heard, “sometime ago”, was $600 million.

At the same time, Bunting said efforts were being made to contain the costs of unnecessary post-mortems to taxpayers, but admitted that there was clearly a need to regulate undertakers.

Smith was supported by Opposition MP for West Kingston Desmond McKenzie, who expressed concern about the lack of regulation of funeral homes, and the growth in the number of operators without proper facilities.

“There are two important aspects of Jamaican life that do not require any formal approval from Government: one is to be a mechanic, and the other is to be an undertaker,” McKenzie claimed.

He recalled that the country has not had a public morgue since the closure of the last one at Darling Street in West Kingston in 1976. However, he said that land was donated by the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation in 1992 for the building of a new morgue at a cost of $30 million, and ground was broken by the then Government, but nothing was done to complete the process.

“All you need to become an undertaker is a deep freeze,” McKenzie alleged at Tuesday’s meeting of the Standing Finance Committee of the House of Representatives, which was reviewing the 2014/15 estimates of expenditure.

He said that the minister should investigate how autopsies were being done and why people from the Corporate Area had to be going to Spanish Town to have them carried out.

“If you don’t know somebody out there yuh suffer! People are waiting up to six weeks just to get an autopsy done,” McKenzie said.

He said, too, that undertakers holding bodies on behalf of the Government complained that they were not being paid, “so they treat bodies taken to their facilities different from how they treat those that are paid for upfront”.

Opposition spokesman on health, Dr Kenneth Baugh, said that the situation has grown so bad in his West Central St Catherine constituency that burials are being banned in some areas, because of the threat of embalming chemicals contaminating the water table.

“It is a real big issue,” Dr Baugh said. “In an area of my constituency burials are now being denied because of the threat of contamination of the water table.”

He said a number of ‘suitcase undertakers’ do not have the facilities for storage of bodies and, because of that, they do the embalming at an earlier stage and use much more formalin than is necessary, especially in cases where there is a lot of outpouring of fluid.

“This formalin is a poison, and there is the question of the environment and contamination,” Dr Baugh explained.

He said that he had suggested that the country contemplate more cremation of bodies as an alternative to burial because it is less dangerous and much cheaper. However, he noted that cremation was not culturally acceptable among most Jamaicans.

“We have to consider making it acceptable, and maybe the MPs can start the process, by indicating their willingness to be cremated when they die, as it might give leadership to a decision like that being taken,” he suggested.

Baugh added that the situation required the immediate attention of the Ministry of National Security to provide more facilities for storage of bodies and the co-operation of the Ministry of Health and the National Environmental Planning Agency to resolve the issue.