‘Blinded to the consequence of his actions’

NOT evil, not incompetent, but deeply flawed and working in an environment where faults went uninvestigated and uncorrected.

The picture that emerges of Dr Micheal Neary in the Lourdes Inquiry report is not one that lends itself to easy analysis.

It was not within the inquiry’s brief to probe why he robbed so many women of their chance of motherhood, but Judge Maureen Harding Clark could not omit the question.

She had a chance to ask him herself as he attended the inquiry twice for lengthy interviews, but he was unable to cast much light on his own behaviour.

In fact “he was visibly taken aback and shocked when confronted with the number of hysterectomies that the inquiry attributed to him”.

Dr Neary was considered a real catch by Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital when they employed him in 1974, as he had trained and worked in modern, well-equipped hospitals in Britain and all Lourdes had to offer him were “primitive conditions”, “basic equipment” and a “heavy workload”.

Dr Neary quickly established himself as a hardworking and committed doctor who treated more patients than his two consultant colleagues and was able and willing to do Caesarean sections, which were virtually unknown in the hospital up until his arrival.

By today’s standards his youthful age at the time, just 31, and his bare seven years of specialist obstetrics and gynaecological training, would make him an odd candidate for a consultant, but no one seems to have doubted his skills or questioned his experience.

He was odd in many ways, however. While in Britain he had refused to carry out contraceptive sterilisations on moral grounds - a stance that brought him into conflict with some employers - yet when he joined the Lourdes, a Catholic hospital run by a missionary order, his heavy reliance on hysterectomies meant he was needlessly sterilising women all the time.

He also appeared to have “irrational anxieties” about bleeding that “approached phobic dimensions”.

He would often say he had no choice but to remove a woman’s womb to stop her bleeding to death from complications during childbirth.

According to Judge Harding Clark: “It is clear that Dr Neary was unable to deal conservatively with serious bleeding and saw every haemorrhage as inevitably life-threatening.”

One father, who had been present for all of his children’s births, told the inquiry that he and his wife, who was having their fifth baby, had to calm Dr Neary down and reassure him that some bleeding was normal after the doctor began sweating, became agitated and suggested they better resort to a Caesarean.

The inquiry noted that Dr Neary’s training ended the day he arrived in Drogheda but it was felt that his failings were probably more due to a personality defect that blinded him to the consequences of his actions.

“A caring doctor should have been able to recognise that hysterectomy in a young woman was a heartbreak, even when carried out for cogent reason,” the report says.

It concludes it was difficult not to have some sympathy for Dr Neary, who is described as being in poor health.

“He is pilloried in the media and frequently referred to as a ‘monster’ or a ‘mutilator of women’ and the ‘disgraced obstetrician’.

“The affect on his life is profound. He will never practice medicine again, and he will never be given the opportunity to see how and where he got it wrong.”