Dr Brian Farrell, who was appointed Dublin City Coroner in 1991, is both a trained barrister and a pathologist, in which capacity he practised at a number of hospitals before assuming his current role.
Presiding over the busiest district in the State, Dr Farrell is the State's only full-time coroner; all others are part-time officials who are also practising lawyers or doctors.
Well regarded among gardaí, lawyers, pathologists and peers, he has written widely on Ireland's coronial service and medico-legal matters more generally.
In the absence of any official guidelines or rules - save for the 1962 Coroners Act itself - for coroners, the bereaved and others attending inquests, the interpretation of procedure often rests with individual coroners.
However Dr Farrell's own work, Coroners: Practice and Procedures, is a standard text.
Coroners have long pushed for radical reform of a system laced with anachronisms (there is no training for coroners and the system by which the 48 coroner districts were divided was arrived at in the mid-1800s, for instance), and the Government, recognising that the 1962 Act is obsolete, has said it will shortly publish legislation to comprehensively reform the system.
An active member of the Coroners' Society of Ireland, Dr Farrell has frequently argued for such reform, and was himself involved in several important legal cases that determined the role and legal standing of the inquest.
In 1993, the Supreme Court stated that an inquest was to establish who, where, when and how a person died.
Importantly, the court believed that the "how" was a medical question, to be construed in terms of medical evidence, usually by a consultant pathologist, implying that the circumstances of a death were beyond an inquest's remit.
However, in 2001, in Eastern Health Board v Dublin City Coroner, the Supreme Court found the earlier ruling to have been too narrow an interpretation and stated that coroners could look fully into the circumstances of each death.
Dr Farrell was also one of the most prominent voices calling on the Government to lift the restriction on the number of medical witnesses that can be heard at an inquest.
Speaking as he adjourned an inquest into the death of a two-year-old haemophiliac boy in Crumlin hospital in October 2004, he said the restriction - whereby only two medical experts, including a pathologist, could give evidence at any one inquest - was unwarranted and prevented coroners from carrying out full and fair hearings.
There was a constitutional imperative for fair procedure at inquests, he argued, and this was being stifled by the restriction.
It was lifted in December 2005.
