Only a mother could stop Neary
by Brendan Coffey
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The Michael Neary scandal has just been televised on RTE.
A surgeon in a Co Louth hospital carried out unnecessary Caesarean hysterectomies on many women in his care. The details are harrowing but it’s only when the torment of what happened is actually transmitted into the comfort of your sitting room that you realise the extent of this evil.
Neary carried on like a man for whom there was no one to answer to and the problem was that because of his exalted status that was essentially the truth.
I’ve heard it said before about scandals like this that at the root of the problem is the fact there are often no women in charge when such horrible things occur. The role of the mother in Irish society is a strange one because while she has always been the authoritarian figure in the home she has never really been given much power.
You can see from the horror on the faces of the women who went through the unnecessary Caesarean hysterectomies that there is no way that a woman could stand idly by. It is nothing against men but in a hierarchial structure it is the leader at the top that dictates whats right and wrong, not the sense of right and wrong that we learn through our ordinary, daily lives.
This is clear from the TV series. The people who worked around Neary accepted his practice because of his authority and while there were many female nurses in close quarters, it is men who held the real authority. The role of the mother was diminished. It is no surprise that the whistleblower who eventually brought a stop to Neary’s savagery was female.
The scandals that have rocked Irish society, the abuse of children in industrial schools, the abuse of children by paedophile priests and the Neary case highlight times when the role of the mother in Irish society was reduced to a secluded position in the kitchen.
The only thing that stops people like Neary is instinct because in a culture that comes to accept authority from the top we only have that instinct to guide us when others tell us that we are wrong. A mother’s instinct, thankfully, can never be taken from her despite all that Neary tried to take from his many victims. It is there bravery in eventually shouting stop to his barbaric acts that finally ended his reign of terror.
If only a mother could love a man like Michael Neary then only a mothering instinct could stop him.
Tags: health, Michael Neary, mothers
