Michael Neary (surgeon) - Report Findings

Report Findings

The Inquiry found that Dr. Neary carried out 129 of 188 peripartum hysterectomies carried out in the hospital over a 25-year period, some on very young women of low parity. The average consultant obstetrician carries out 5 or 6 of these operations in their entire career. The judge also found that numerous patient files had disappeared from the hospital, obviously removed by people sympathetic to Michael Neary, she wrote. She was unable to find out who removed the files but believes the person to be female. She criticised the 'Catholic ethos' of the hospital at the time. Sterilisation was forbidden, contraception was unavailable, but she reported that 'secondary' sterilisations were commonly and sympathetically carried out on women who did not want more children but were forbidden to use contraception by the Church. Dr. Neary said this was the main reason he carried out so many hysterectomies. He also said the number in the report was wrong, that it was actually less. The report states that there was a "culture of respect and fear" in the unit so that even when questions were raised, people did not have the opportunity or the courage to speak out. The Inquiry came to the conclusion that Dr. Neary had a “heightened sense of danger” and that his fear of losing a patient approached “phobic dimensions” and led him to practice defensive medicine and carry out hysterectomies when he feared losing a patient. Judge Harding-Clarke wrote that questions should have been asked in the hospital long before 1998, when things first came to light. “The unplanned sterilisation of a young woman, as some of Dr. Neary’s patients were, is too high a price to pay for a surgeon’s phobias,” states the inquiry report. One anaesthetist appointed to Lourdes in the 90s told the Inquiry that while people who worked with Dr. Neary come out and criticise him now, they “all thought he was wonderful” in 1996. Dr. Neary was seen as a hard-working consultant and was much respected in the area.

In February 2006, when the report was released, the Health Service Executive issued an apology to the women who suffered at the hands of Dr. Neary. The Inquiry found how a senior consultant colleague of Dr. Neary’s in the 70s and 80s, now deceased, told a Matron who was questioning the high number of hysterectomies that Dr. Neary was “afraid of haemorrhage”. A junior consultant pathologist at the hospital in the early 80s asked his senior colleague why a perinatal uterus specimen he received seemed to have nothing wrong with it. The senior consultant replied “that’s Michael Neary for you”. Dr. Neary himself told the inquiry that he would have welcomed the opportunity to retrain and to observe other obstetricians at work. During the inquiry, he was asked about the frequent media claims that he hated women, and he replied that this was untrue, that “women were intuitive” and knew when men did not like them.

Judge Harding-Clarke wrote in the inquiry report that it "was hard not to have some sympathy for Dr. Neary". She said: “It was difficult not to have some sympathy for Dr. Neary…his health is no longer strong. He is pilloried in the media and referred to as a 'monster' and a 'mutilator of women'. The effect 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".