FORMER CORONER Dr Kieran Geraghty has described the practice of putting patients who are awaiting hospital beds on trolleys in corridors as “atrocious”.
“I would not like to lie on a trolley for 19 hours in a corridor. I’d get up and go home. I just don’t know how people put up with that,” says the former Dublin County Coroner, who retired last month.
“If I was Minister for Health, I’d pull up outside all of these hospitals in a caravan and I’d spend a week living in the hospital to see what is going on,” he says. “There is too much management from a distance.”
The former coroner, who spent 12 years at the helm of one of the busiest coroner districts in the State, speaks his mind.
At an inquest in June into the death of Thomas Walsh (65), who died in a “virtual ward” or corridor in Tallaght hospital, Dublin, on March 2nd while awaiting a bed, Geraghty said the hospital sounded like a “very dangerous” place.
The next day, the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa) announced it was to carry out an investigation into the safety of patient care in the emergency department of Tallaght hospital. And at the end of August, Hiqa told Tallaght hospital to stop placing patients who are due to be admitted to the hospital on trolleys in corridors near the emergency department, following an unannounced inspection of the department.
“If the trolley problem in [Tallaght] casualty is solved, why has it been going on for 25 years in every hospital in Ireland?”asks Geraghty.
“It just seems to me, by holding an inquest and making some strong comments, suddenly these problems could be resolved . . . and why did it have to wait for me to hold an inquest . . . when somebody had died . . . to make that happen?”
Geraghty, who also worked as a general practitioner at a busy Dún Laoghaire practice until his retirement, hadn’t always planned to be a doctor. “When I was a young fellow there was no such thing as going to university . . . everybody had to emigrate,” he recalls.
But his aunt agreed to pay his university fees to attend Trinity College Dublin. He started off taking a pre-veterinary course, but changed to medicine when he realised the life of a vet was not for him.
In 1963, he became a lieutenant in the British Army and the army paid his fees. “I went from being one of the poorest students to being one of the richest. I had my own car and everything,” he recalls.
After qualifying, Geraghty worked for five years as a captain in the army and spent time in the UK, the Middle East and Germany, where he met his wife, Terri, a nurse.
When they returned to Ireland in 1972, he began working as a GP with Dr Bartley Sheehan, who was coroner for the County of Dublin at the time. The following year Geraghty became the deputy coroner for the county and went on to become coroner in 1999.
In his 12 years, one of the “most dramatic cases” as coroner was the Dalkey baby inquest into the death of a baby girl, whose body was found in a laneway in Dún Laoghaire in April 1973.
The jury at an inquest in 2007 found the baby, who was named Noeleen Murphy, was the child of Cynthia Owen, who had alleged the baby was conceived as a result of sexual abuse at the family home in Dalkey.
The jury found the baby had died at the family home and that the cause of death was haemorrhage due to stab wounds. An open verdict was returned.
“It went on for about four days. It was very emotional. There were 12 jury members and they were all crying at the end of it. They [the jury] were out for a long time – maybe three or four hours – but eventually they came in and announced that all 12 accepted she [Cynthia Owen] was the mother of the child. That was terribly emotional. She was screaming crying. You have no idea . . . it was the most emotional thing I have ever been to.”
Afterwards, he called Cynthia Owen back to the stand and asked her for the baby’s name. “I just thought the baby deserved a name.”
A sister of Ms Owen brought judicial review proceedings seeking to overturn the unanimous jury finding at an inquest.
Ms Owen’s sister claimed that Ms Owen’s allegations of the murder and disposal by a family member of the baby were completely untrue and that there was, in fact, no baby. The legal row was settled at the High Court in 2010. The settlement terms include an acknowledgement by Geraghty that the verdict did not implicate Ms Owen’s sister in any wrongdoing whatsoever.
In his experience as a doctor and a coroner, Geraghty says: “Child abuse is endemic in society in this country.
“The main perpetrators . . . are family members. It’s much more difficult for a victim to expose a family member,” says Geraghty who adds he is aware that in cases of suicide, sexual abuse can sometimes be a factor.
Geraghty said he was contacted by other victims of abuse after that inquest and that he put them in contact with the gardaí. He said they got courage from the (inquest) case and from Cynthia Owen.
Another inquest that sticks in his memory is the death of a young man who collapsed and died during a basketball tournament and who had drunk up to three cans of Red Bull on the day.
A jury reached a unanimous verdict that the cause of death was unexplained Sudden Adult Death syndrome. There was no evidence that the drink was responsible for his death.
“I’ve had a significant number of cases of young men just dropping dead – Sudden Adult Death syndrome – it’s sad when it happens.”
