A man of honesty, compassion and insight

MEDICAL MATTERS:Maurice Neligan's 'Heart Beat' columns were incisive

CAN IT be a year already since we lost Maurice Neligan? Meeting his wife Pat, the family and his friends last week at the launch of Heart Beat, a book of his columns from this supplement, brought back many happy memories.

It also triggered a curiosity about what Maurice would say about the current state of the health service. How would he rate the performance of James Reilly as Minister for Health? What would he make of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland’s governance of its medical school in Bahrain? And as an advocate of universal health insurance, in which the money follows the patient, how would he respond to the lack of progress in advancing this central plank of Government health policy?

Certainly, his response would be engaging and leavened with just the right amount of wit. It would be an honest opinion based on compassion and insight. His radar was especially acute when it came to political decision-making (and political decision-dodging). And it would certainly be entertaining and mind-broadening; he was someone who understood the value of a well-chosen quote.

Writing in advance of the 2006 election, he quoted Lewis Carroll: “The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today.” It was a warning of all the “goodies” we would be promised during the campaign, blandishments as ethereal as the most fleeting will o’ the wisp. Certainly, in terms of improving our public health service, it is always a case of “never jam today”.

John Betjeman's First and Last Loves"Oh prams on concrete balconies, what will your children see?" illustrated the 2010 column in which he very publicly changed his mind on the best location for the new national paediatric hospital. "We can do better, and in view of the fact this National Children's Hospital is about all the sick children of Ireland, not just Dublin, let's look for a greenfield site, spacious and easy of access," he wrote, with no hint of hubris.

In 2007, following the loss of his beloved daughter Sara, he wrote movingly of meeting her again “in sunlit uplands”. Emily Dickinson provided Maurice with a description of the family’s feelings after the tragedy: “The sweeping up the Heart, And putting Love away, We shall not want to use again. Until eternity.”

Indeed, it is the more personal columns that resonate most for me. Describing the family’s holiday home in Dooks, Co Kerry, on a clear calm day, Maurice wrote: “The grass in the meadow was unruffled and a cock pheasant poked unhurriedly around the margins. A disorderly mob of siskins, greenfinches and chaffinches pushed and jostled at the bird table and feeders . . . It was a genuinely ‘good to be alive’ morning.” The Dooks annals include a beautifully crafted piece on nostalgia; a visit to Skellig Michael where reality and memory clash; and a racing turkey as the source of domestic discord.

Pat we knew as the Highest Authority, to whom Maurice claimed to defer; you can enjoy again the adventures of HA in the book. After Pat had become tangled in their electronic gate, he returned from playing golf to find “the HA not in the best of humours. We men tend to notice such things, as we are very sensitive to sudden drops in room temperature”, he tells us with Wodehousian understatement.

Then there was the phone call telling of the flooding of the house in Dooks during a freezing spell. HA proceeded to ask if Maurice had left

on some background heat and turned off the water as instructed. “I might point out that none of these tasks ever fell to me before. I am barely qualified with the vacuum cleaner and have only a provisional licence to fill the dishwasher,” pleaded the veteran of more than 15,000 cardiac operations and the man who performed Ireland’s first heart transplant.

Editor Deirdre Veldon has chosen wisely and well. The columns in the new book are remarkably fresh, and despite my inevitable bias, I’m certain they will offer a veritable treat for his many fans.

Heart Beat

by Maurice Neligan,

The Irish Times

, 2011, €8.99.