The Neary scandal - Programmes a challenge to us all

THE appalling, barbaric story of disgraced former doctor Michael Neary is well known.

Like a recurring, inescapable bad dream the images that define Neary’s infamous behaviour are so awful that we cannot avoid confronting them or the environment that allowed him to inflict such pain on women who had entrusted themselves to his care.

The implications and consequences of Neary’s behaviour are today — five years after he was struck off — unavoidable for anyone who hopes we have become a society where deference and privilege are no longer shields for wrongdoers.

The whole, sorry shaming saga passed a milestone of sorts over the past two nights when RTÉ broadcast Whistleblower, an uncompromising and provocative drama based on the outrage.

How traumatic the programmes must have been for the women and families involved we can barely imagine. However, those who supported Neary, and the hierarchy that protected him for so long, can no longer say that they didn’t realise the extent of his wrongdoing.

The drama showed Neary and his Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital Drogheda operating theatre colleagues discussing plans for Christmas holidays while the life of the woman on the operating table was being changed utterly and unnecessarily.

It showed mindless deference to authority despite knowing that authority was being terribly misused and at a great cost to innocent victims. It showed a silence — communal and professional — that amounted to tacit support and bordered on collusion.

In her Lourdes Hospital Inquiry Report, Justice Maureen Harding Clarke, described that silence in the starkest of terms: “No one saw anything out of the ordinary, no one heard even a whisper of disquiet, and no one was given any reason to say or think that any of the hysterectomies were questionable. Few complained or questioned. Not the patients, their partners nor their families...; not the junior doctors nor the post-membership registrars; not the anaesthetists who received the patient, administered the anaesthesia, wrote up the operation notes and spoke to each patient in the recovery room and were always present at the operations; not the surgical nurses, who were frequently midwives, and always women, who handed the hysterectomy clamps to the surgeons and counted the swabs; not the midwives who cared for the women after their operations and who recorded each day the women stayed in the post-natal ward and the fact they had had a peripartum hysterectomy; not the pathologists and technicians who received the wombs and specimens from the maternity theatre, who dissected, examined and reported; not the matrons who made ward rounds and who contacted the public health nurses; not the sisters of the Medical Missionaries of Mary who owned the hospital and employed the obstetricians; not one of the various GPs whose patients attended the IMTH (International Missionary Training Hospital) and underwent caesarean hysterectomy; not any of the parties who read the maternity hospital’s biennial reports in the years when it was published.”

As indictments go it does not get much more comprehensive than that and none of us should take comfort in the notion we are not implicated. In short, the programmes showed Irish medicine, Irish hospitals, Irish authority and Irish society at their very worst.

But, amid all the dismissive arrogance, there was a ray of hope; there was a whistleblower. A person who had the courage to speak out, to inspire health board staff to confront Neary.

Any sane person might imagine that once wrongdoing on this scale was exposed that redress would be automatic, comprehensive and easily accessed. Amazingly, this is not the case. Commentating on the programmes yesterday Sheila O’Connor of Patient Focus, the organisation that represents some of Neary’s former patients, pointed out that some victims are outside the compensation process. Some lose out on age grounds — one by three days — others because they were not involved in childbirth when Neary performed unnecessary and irreversible procedures.

This situation, which is being considered “favourably” by the Department of Health, is unacceptable and all of the women must be treated equally. After all there are a finite number of cases.

RTÉ is to be congratulated for highlighting the role authority figures played in the wrongs of the past. The programme was a vindication of public service broadcasting, an encouragement to whistleblowers and, most of all, a challenge to all of us not to turn away when we see power abused and innocent people turned into victims.