The late Dr Michael J Kelleher will be laid out in his rooms at Perrott Avenue, Cork, before his removal this evening.
His family made this decision to allow his many patients to say goodbye to a psychiatrist who had dedicated his life to medicine, particularly suicide research.
Dr Kelleher, director of the National Suicide Research Foundation, had been ill for the past year and died on Sunday evening, aged 60. He is survived by his wife Margaret, a general practitioner, and his children Katharine, Denis, Michael jnr, Dominic and Eric.
According to Ms Eileen Williamson, co-ordinator of the foundation, Dr Kelleher had a close relationship with his patients who will want to pay their last respects. "We are all terribly sad here this morning. He is a tremendous loss and we will miss him terribly." At the time of his death, Dr Kelleher was vice-president of the Association of Suicide Research and Crisis Intervention. He was the first European to be invited to become director of the US Association of Suicidology. Next month an editorial he was invited to write for the British Journal of Psychiatry will be published, further recognition of his international standing.
His death is made all the more poignant by the relatively recent recognition of his work, and the measures taken as a result to combat suicide.
The Minister for Health, Mr Cowen, led the tributes to Dr Kelleher yesterday, expressing sorrow at his death. "I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the commitment he brought to dealing with the causes of suicide and to combating this phenomenon in Irish society. I would like to extend my sympathies to his family," said Mr Cowen.
The president of the Irish Association of Suicidology, Senator Dan Neville, said Dr Kelleher's contribution to the tragedy of suicide had been critical "in persuading society and officialdom to recognise the issue as a public health problem". "His book Suicide and the Irish is regarded as the definitive text on this issue," said Mr Neville.
Dr Kelleher's proposals to set up the National Task Force on Suicide in 1996, which reported earlier this year, would be the key to developing policies to reduce the levels of Irish suicide and to responding to the need of families left behind.
Dr John Connolly, honorary secretary of the Irish Association of Suicidology, said his contribution to suicide research was greater than all others put together. "He is a tremendous loss to Irish psychiatry and to suicidology in particular," said Dr Connolly, chief psychiatrist in Co Mayo. Dr Mary McCarthy, registrar at St Anne's Hospital, worked with Dr Kelleher for more than 20 years in the hospital, of which he was clinical director. Yesterday she said: "As a doctor and a psychiatrist he had a marvellous way with patients to get them to confide in him. This made him a brilliant diagnostician." He was also a marvellous teacher, Dr McCarthy said, for nurses, undergraduate medical students and post-graduate students training to be psychiatrists. "Whatever the subject he would make it interesting, always bringing in a philosophical dimension."
Dr Kelleher became interested in suicide many years ago when he moved back to Cork from London, where he worked in Maudsley Hospital. He studied medicine at University College Cork and became involved in research into suicide and its causes with the late Dr Maura Daly in St Anne's Hospital.