Geraldine Feeney (Fianna Fail)

I welcome the Minister of State to the House for this important debate. I am delighted the Upper House has an opportunity to debate what the Minister described as an excellent, fair, comprehensive report. We thank Judge Maureen Harding Clark for the speedy report she has presented. Before I begin I want to congratulate Patient Focus, particularly Sheila O'Connor, who stuck with this issue and counselled very vulnerable women when nobody else was available to listen to them.

I am aware of the personal circumstances of the Neary women because I sat on the Medical Council's inquiry which lasted three years and I have a particular knowledge of events covered in Judge Maureen Harding Clark's report. I listened with great sadness to the story of the victims of Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. As a woman and a mother, I empathise greatly with the pain and suffering that was so evident in all their stories. Some of these women told their stories ten years after the event. I remember thinking at the time that it could have happened yesterday, last week or last month because the pain was so evident in the voices and faces of these women.

The Medical Council acted swiftly in December 1998 when it received the prima facie evidence from the health board at the time. It went to the High Court to obtain a section 51 order under the Medical Practitioners Act. Section 51 of the Act will render a doctor unfit to practise and he will be taken out of commission pending a full Medical Council fitness to practise inquiry. Following that inquiry, Dr. Neary was struck off the medical register, and rightly so.

Michael Neary was a deeply flawed practitioner whose actions were unforgivable. Senator Terry said we have to know why he acted as he did. I attended that inquiry over a three year period and on many occasions I looked across at the man to try to gain some insight into what might have gone wrong for him but I saw no remorse nor did I gain any insight. When women broke down giving their evidence, I bit the inside of my lips and felt a lump in my throat as I held back tears. I find it difficult to talk about it even today. Their stories were horrific. In the nine cases I heard, not one of those women had a hysterectomy for sterilisation purposes. They ranged in age from a teenager of 19 having her first baby to a woman of 32 years of age. Women today do not even start having their families at 32 years of age.

On the high number of caesarean hysterectomies carried out by Michael Neary — I will continue to call him Michael Neary because it is a shame to the profession of medicine that this man was called "Doctor" for so long — I was told by Dr. Eamon McGuinness, an obstetrician-gynaecologist who sat on the inquiry with me, that in his 30 years of practice he had carried out one caesarean hysterectomy on a woman in her mid-30s who had five children. He worked on that woman for eight hours. He massaged and packed the uterus and did everything medically possible to try to preserve it. She received 11 or 12 units of blood and, after nine hours, the doctor called in one of his senior colleagues to help with the operation. I tell this story because Dr. Neary never called in any of his colleagues to help. He proceeded to perform a hysterectomy within minutes of delivering babies. The babies were delivered, the hysterectomies were carried out and the women were back in recovery within an hour to an hour and a quarter. The hair is standing on my head recalling the horrific events about which I have heard.

It is worthwhile recalling a few of the women's stories. I will not name any of them but I will never forget their names. The first woman I want to talk about delivered a little baby girl on 18 August 1986. One might ask how I can remember the date; I remember it because my fourth baby, a daughter, was born the very same day in the north west in Sligo General Hospital. I was ten years the woman's senior — she was 19 and I was 29. My baby was born perfectly healthy at 7 a.m. and the woman's little baby girl was born at 2 p.m. Her baby, who was called Eileen, had spina bifida and died six weeks later. I will never forget the mother's tears and those of her husband as they told us their stories. She is still married to her lovely husband but her life is a living hell. She has been robbed of the most vital thing any woman has, that is, the facility to procreate.

Another lady, who lost her first baby at 23 weeks, had her second baby delivered by Dr. Neary at full term. She begged him from the operating table not to carry out a caesarean hysterectomy. She had asked her husband before her baby was delivered not to let the doctor take away her womb. Dr. Neary told her, after delivering her little baby boy, that he had to proceed to hysterectomy within ten minutes or she would die. She felt perfectly well and there was no way she would have died within ten minutes, as he told her. He told her husband that if he did not sign the consent form she would be dead within ten minutes. The other midwives all knew the woman and one cried and asked the doctor to go for Dr. Lynch, but Dr. Neary said the woman would be dead if the hysterectomy was not carried out immediately.

I query the consent Dr. Neary received to remove any of these uteri. I do not believe he had consent but that he robbed the women of their uteri. When the Medical Council conducted its inquiry, I spoke on "News at One" and stated the report should be handed over to the Garda and that a criminal investigation should be carried out.

Another story concerns a lovely young girl in her late 20s who delivered her third baby. In this case Dr. Neary also proceeded to perform a hysterectomy. The woman did not want to be involved in the Medical Council's inquiry and we respected that. However, when Dr. Neary gave evidence and it was adduced by his senior counsel that the lady was a Jehovah's Witness, and that, for religious reasons, she had asked that blood not be given to her and that her uterus be taken, if necessary, I could not sit and listen to that kind of evidence. I asked that the lady be subpoenaed and when she came before us her evidence directly contradicted that of Dr. Neary. I tell these terrible stories to afford Members an insight into what occurred. On reading the report one would never know the horrific nature of the procedures to which the women in question were subjected.

I mentioned Sheila O'Connor earlier in my address and I am delighted to see her and some of the women from Patient Focus, who have been affected by Dr. Michael Neary, in the Visitors Gallery. They are very welcome. How and why did these procedures on the part of Dr. Neary occur? We will never know and I do not believe anybody will ever get through to that man's mind to know why. This is poor consolation to the women affected.

We all know pregnancy and the birth of a baby comprise a very joyous occasion. Pregnancy is not an illness but a condition one enjoys from the minute one is told one is carrying a baby until one delivers it. Pregnancy represents a family time, but the women in question have been cruelly denied the possibility of ever experiencing it. There are women who have had one baby but who will never have another. I know of one woman whose little baby girl died and she will never have another to replace her, not that one can ever replace a child.

I find this very upsetting. As I said to Sheila O'Connor last night, I have had sleepless nights for the past week and had them all through the inquiry. If that is how I am feeling, how in the name of God are the women Dr. Neary butchered and violated feeling? What happened to them is beyond belief. They have been let down by us all, and such a system should never have been in place.

Dr. Neary played God and nobody ever said to him he could not do so. The sisters who ran the hospital looked up to him as God, as did the junior staff he was training. On reading the records of the women involved in the nine cases I know about, I noted that Dr. Neary really did play God with them. He wrote in their charts statements such as "Lucky to survive the night", "Thank God I was able to save her", "Got away with this one — baby and mother alive" and "Uncontrollable bleeding, couldn't stop it, spent all night in theatre". I know that none of this was factual. Dr. Neary never spent all night in the theatre and there was never any uncontrollable bleeding, as we now know.

The people to whom I really point a finger are Dr. Neary's senior colleagues, the pathologists and anaesthetists, who should not have been afraid to address the matter. The anaesthetists were in the delivery rooms and operating theatres and saw there was no raised blood pressure or increased pulse rates and they knew the women would not die in 15 or 20 minutes. The pathologists who examined the uteri and sent them back to Dr. Michael Neary saying no abnormality could be found in them have many questions to answer.

The "three wise men" sent to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital by the Irish Hospital Consultants Association — Drs. Prendiville, Stuart and Murphy — issued a report giving Dr. Neary a clean bill of health, as implied in Judge Harding Clark's report. She adduced that they did so out of congeniality and compassion for Dr. Neary. They must have told her so. Shame on those men. If I had a stronger word or if I were permitted to use offensive language in this Chamber, I would certainly use it in respect of them. Shame on them.

If a man had a minor procedure carried out on his reproductive organ and he emerged from the operating theatre minus that organ, there would be outrage. It might happen once but would never happen 188 times. The women in question were vulnerable and were robbed of their internal reproductive organs. There is no other word but "robbed".

Can it happen again? Unless we change the Medical Practitioners Acts, it will happen again. It is possible that it is already happening in another discipline. I am aware of the Tánaiste's interest in this matter because I have spoken to her. I compliment and praise her on the humane way she has dealt with it since the publication of the report last week. I note that Ms Sheila O'Connor of Patient Focus, who is in the Visitors Gallery, is nodding her head. Patient Focus has been in contact with the Tánaiste on many occasions. I am confident the Tánaiste will act effectively and efficiently to bring legislation to both Houses so that there is change in this regard. I am sure I have gone over time.