Description
This terrible story happened in a Dublin Hospital in the early 1970’s. Through gross medical incompetence and malpractice, compounded by denial and arrogance, a young woman is put into a chronic vegetative state from which there is no prospect of ever recovering.
Those responsible for this disaster added to their disgrace by denying their victim her right to die. Rather, by tube feeding her, they locked her into a hideous state of suspense between life and death from which she cannot possibly escape without help.
Finally, after almost twenty years, the victim’s mother was forced to take a High Court action compelling her daughter’s carers to allow her daughter to die with a modicum of dignity. After a long, protracted, and tortious legal battle, she eventually won her case. The artificial feeding was discontinued, and her daughter was allowed to rest in peace at last. Thus her daughter became the defendant for Ireland’s first Right to Die case.
Because these legal proceedings were held in camera the names of the institutions and individuals involved were never disclosed or released into the public domain. Therefore, what’s given here is, of necessity, fictionalized. However, the author, a retired doctor and coroner, was made sufficiently aware of the facts of the case by colleagues involved, to vouch for their accuracy in broad terms.
Doctor Andrew Rynne is a retired Irish surgeon, medical practitioner and founder of Clane General Hospital in County Kildare. Rynne was the chairperson of the Irish Family Planning Association and the Republic of Ireland’s first vasectomy specialist. He lives with his wife, Ramona. Both his parents, Stephen Rynne and Alice Curtayne were well-known writers and he himself is a published author.
