THE DIRECTOR of Public Prosecutions (DPP) has decided that complaints from a number of women about the manner in which they were treated by former Drogheda obstetrician Dr Michael Neary provide insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges against him.
Eight women had made statements to gardaí alleging assault by Dr Neary. Most of them had undergone unnecessary Caesarean hysterectomies at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, where Dr Neary worked from 1974 to 1998.
The complaints to gardaí were lodged by the women in 2006 and 2007 under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act and the 1997 Non Fatal Offences Against the Person Act. Gardaí investigated the complaints and interviewed Dr Neary before sending a file to the DPP.
Patient Focus, the group representing the women, has now been informed, however, that the DPP cannot press charges.
Sheila O'Connor, spokeswoman for Patient Focus, said yesterday she had been told the DPP had decided in the absence of an admission by Dr Neary or corroboration of the women's stories by another consultant there was insufficient evidence to bring charges. "The women who made complaints to the gardaí are very disappointed," she said.
However, she said the DPP's position related to just eight complaints. In the last year she said Patient Focus had heard from a large number of other women whose operations were gynaecological rather than obstetric.
These were young women who had both ovaries removed for non-existent diseases and they hadn't even got to the stage yet of considering whether to make complaints to gardaí, she said.
Overall, she said, the DPP's decision in the eight cases was "very worrying" and had implications for other patients trying to bring cases against other doctors in future.
She said this was because the law would not protect them from a doctor "who continues to believe and to state he did nothing wrong despite huge medical evidence to the contrary".
Cathriona Molloy, one of the eight women who made a complaint to the Garda about Dr Neary, said she was very disappointed at the DPP's decision.
Her womb was unnecessarily removed by Dr Neary when she was aged 25 after the birth of her second child in 1996.
Dr Neary was struck off the medical register in 2003 for professional misconduct over the unnecessary removal of the wombs of a number of patients.
The Lourdes Hospital Inquiry report, into how so many Caesarean hysterectomies were allowed to be performed at the hospital over many years without anyone calling for this to stop, was published in 2006 and passed on to gardaí.
However, it is understood it did not result in any new leads in relation to how the files of 44 women who had hysterectomies at the hospital went missing.
A previous Garda investigation into the missing files ended in a file being sent to the DPP but no prosecution was taken.