DUBLIN (Reuters) - Ireland's nuclear protection body said on Tuesday it accepted a report that concluded a cluster of Down's syndrome births in the republic in the 1960s and 1970s were not linked to Britain's Sellafield reactor.

The Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland said there was no link between the cluster and a fire at Sellafield, then called Windscale, in 1957, but added it still had serious worries about the plant on Britain's northwest coast.

``Ireland's objections to Sellafield are solidly based on the continuing radioactive contamination of the Irish Sea, and most of all on the risk to this country of serious consequences from a major accident at the plant,'' said RPII chief Tom O'Flaherty.

``These objections are not undermined because the suggestion of a link with the Down's syndrome cluster has been disproved.''

A long-held theory suggested the births of Down's syndrome babies to six women who attended the same school in Dundalk, across the Irish Sea on the northeast coast of Ireland, was linked to radioactive contamination from the 1957 fire.

However the RPII said a new study had revealed three of the women had left the school, and the Dundalk area, some months before the fire, thus disproving a Sellafield connection.

Ireland has campaigned long and hard for the closure of the Sellafield plant.

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