Cleared doctor: Millions on my defence ‘very hurtful’

Paschal Carmody said yesterday “it is very hurtful” that he has had to spend millions of euro to defend his innocence over the past nine years.

Dr Carmody also said that lives of his former patients were lost after the Medical Council intervened in 2003 to prevent him from further providing his range of treatments to 150 cancer patients.

He said: “I believe lives were lost. I have no doubt that lives were lost.”

Dr Carmody, 65, of Ballycuggeran, Killaloe, was speaking yesterday after he was cleared of the two outstanding charges relating to obtaining €14,300 through falsely pretending he could cure the cancer of the late JJ Gallagher of Kingswood, Mullingar, Co Westmeath.

At Ennis Circuit Court, counsel for the State, Stephen Coughlan, said: “I’m sure Dr Carmody’s family will be pleased and relieved to hear that the Director of Public Prosecutions has directed that a nolle prosqui be entered in those proceedings.”

The decision by the DPP comes seven months after Judge Raymond Fullam directed that Dr Carmody be found not guilty on all nine charges of obtaining €16,554 from the families of Co Wexford schoolboy Conor O’Sullivan, 15, and Kilkenny man John Sheridan, 57, in 2001-2002 at the East Clinic in Killaloe, Co Clare.

Judge Fullam said last December the evidence against Dr Carmody was so weak it would be a mistake to allow the case go to jury.

Yesterday’s two-minute hearing brings to a close a nine-year long prosecution process against Dr Carmody that commenced in 2004 when gardaí searched his Killaloe Clinic, and included three separate criminal trials between 2008 and 2012.

In the first case of its type in Ireland, charges were first brought against Dr Carmody in 2006 after a two-year long Garda investigation — the Killaloe doctor had been struck off as a GP by the Medical Council in 2004.