Doctors will mount a legal challenge and begin a campaign of civil disobedience against the new Medical Practitioners Bill as soon as it is enacted later this month, it has emerged.
Dr Seán Ó Dómhnaill, a consultant psychiatrist with Carlow/Kilkenny mental health services, said a group of 1,200 doctors opposed to the Bill will pursue a number of avenues to challenge it, including a legal action.
The leader of the Medical Council Membership Support Committee (MCMSC) - a body independent of the Medical Council - said that following legal advice from a number of senior counsel it would seek either a judicial review of the legislation, or look to have parts of the Act declared unconstitutional. The group objects to a majority of lay people on the Medical Council and what it sees as other threats to professional autonomy contained in the Bill, which the Minister of Health, Mary Harney, says will become law on April 24th.
Dr Ó Dómhnaill said the group had been advised the Medical Practitioners Act interfered with doctors' freedom to form associations. "It makes doctors civil servants rather than public servants". He also claimed the new Act broke the legal contract that existed between every doctor and the Medical Council by virtue of the retention fee they paid to it every year.
As part of a planned campaign of civil disobedience it is understood the group will be asking doctors not to pay their Medical Council annual retention fee when it becomes due on July 1st.
The move could result in large numbers of doctors being struck off the medical register later this year, with a consequent threat to health services early in the life of the next Government.
Earlier, at its annual meeting, members of the Irish Medical Organisation unanimously supported a number of motions criticising the Medical Practitioners Bill. Assam Ishtiaq, a consultant surgeon in Waterford and a former president of the IMO, said the Medical Council would be the only doctors regulatory body in the world to have a lay majority.
Dr Neil Brennan, a consultant respiratory physician at the Mercy Hospital, Cork, questioned whether there would be adequate medical expertise on the new council.
The meeting voted to oppose attempts by the Government and the HSE to "subvert the autonomy of the medical profession, including the right to self regulation".