‘After the shooting, the attacker made his way to a local field. Onlookers saw gardaí surround him — and in the standoff, the man was given cigarettes and a pint of Guinness...’
The pioneering medic and campaigner for reproductive choices, who was shot while in surgery, talks to Dónal Lynch ahead of a documentary on his career
If ever a story provided a strange snapshot of the Gubu Ireland before referenda and social change brought us kicking and screaming into the modern world, it is surely that of Dr Andrew Rynne. In the ‘70s, the media cast the pioneering vasectomy doctor as a kind of medical renegade, as he helped scores of Irish men avoid endless fatherhood. He prescribed the contraceptive pill to women before it was legal in Ireland. A priest called to his house and urged him to stop his work with vasectomies. His own father sought to have him excommunicated from the Catholic Church. Any interference with the Irish tendency to large families was considered borderline heretical.
And so, on a fateful day in 1990 when a man burst into Rynne’s surgery and fired several bullets at the doctor — who was then in the middle of performing a surgery, the initial suspicion might have been that the man may have been some kind of disgruntled ideologue, but the background to the shooting belied this impression.
The gunman had been drinking in a local pub before the shooting, and had told people that he was going to shoot the doctor, but nobody thought he would follow through and they laughed at him. When the gunman burst into the surgery, “he fired at me six or seven times”, Rynne recalls. “I had a feeling that I had escaped with my life. He hit me in the right hip. There was no pain at all. I looked down and saw there was blood flowing down my leg outside my trousers. The bullet was inside the joint itself.”
After the shooting, the attacker made his way to a local field. Onlookers saw gardaí surround him and during the standoff, the man was given cigarettes and a pint.
Rynne was brought for treatment — and later, in a transfer between hospitals, he felt an urge to go back to the scene of the crime. “I don’t know why, but I just wanted to be in the room again. I don’t think it was post traumatic stress. I had a psychiatric friend who is now deceased who told me that PTSD is a sort of make-uppy thing.”
Rynne’s story will be told in a riveting new documentary on TG4 which will be broadcast later this week. It explores the social atmosphere of the Ireland of the time and the strange aftermath of the crime. When he had recovered, Rynne visited his attacker in an institution for the criminally insane.
“I subsequently found out that he had had a vasectomy from me and regretted having had it,” he recalls. “His wife went off and had an affair and became pregnant by someone else, which had nothing to do with me, and he also said that he had considerable pain... It is a thing called transference — every problem he ever had for eight years after the operation became about me.” The gunman had aimed the bullets at Rynne’s genitalia, “sort of like an eye for an eye”, he explains.
The biblical reference is apt, in a way, for
Rynne grew up in a religious household. His parents were writers and they raised their son in Downings House, a large 18thcentury home in Prosperous, Co Kildare.
“My mother was a hagiographer who wrote about saints by and large, her last book was about Francis Ledwidge, the poet,” he explains. “She was very religious and so was my father, he read the Bible every day. I look back on my childhood with great gratitude, my parents spent the days writing and there were interesting people calling to the house. My father hadn’t a clue about money, he employed far too many people on this small little farm — up to eight people.”
His parents were deeply in debt until his mother began to travel to America to give talks. “She made three trips in the mid to late 1950s and she was well got, of course, because all the nuns were reading her books and she made friends, including Cardinal John Wright, who came to our house to say mass.”
Rynne went to secondary school at the Dominican-run Newbridge College, in Kildare, but he says he didn’t rebel against his religious upbringing in his teens. “That came later when I went to Dublin and became involved in the folk revival. I knew all the Dubliners, and Luke Kelly. It was a great time to be in Dublin. I still get emotional when I think of Luke Kelly — what a singer and what a guy. They were superstars and because I was a medical student, they would’ve looked askance at me. I got to know Ronnie Drew well and he sang at my 60th birthday party, he sang ‘Raglan Road’.”
He studied medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons and, after graduating, decided to travel abroad in search of work, eschewing America because of the risk of being drafted to fight in the Vietnam War, and opting instead to go to Canada. In Hamilton he found a more liberal, but also a more closed and insular, society than the one he had left behind in Ireland.
“The trouble with the Canadians was that they didn’t really understand art, they didn’t read and they didn’t understand life outside of their own small world. They were interested in ice hockey and mowing the lawn but it was hard to get a decent argument going.”
He returned to Ireland in 1974 but found it difficult to build up a practice here. Days would pass where he wouldn’t see a single patient. “Then, out of nowhere, the Irish Family Planning Association started to do vasectomies. They had imported an eye surgeon from England who was doing vasectomies for them. And so I wrote to them and said, I’ve come back from Canada and I’ve done hundreds of vasectomies and I feel I’m competent at it and I’m prepared to lend my services to you and they were delighted. I got a job there which was great because it meant I had a small income and something to do.”
Most of the men who came to see him were married and didn’t want more children, or their wife didn’t want to continue taking the Pill. There was still something of a taboo around getting a vasectomy and Rynne recalls that the men would often check that nobody from their home town was going to be in the surgery on the day that they arrived.
He continued quietly performing hundreds of operations and was eventually asked to write a piece in the Irish Medical Journal about vasectomies.
“This [was] peer-reviewed, and I didn’t think it would get into the popular press. The News of the World had a headline ‘Doctor sterilises 420 men in Dublin clinic’ — they made it seem very sleazy, almost as if it was a backstreet thing. My father saw it after mass and approached the local parish priest and said. ‘I think my son should be excommunicated’. The parish priest in Clane was given the unenviable task of doing it and he did it reluctantly because he was a sort of liberal priest. So he went through the motions and came over and we opened a bottle of Jameson and that was the end of that.”
Another priest, from a different parish subsequently called to him and tried to prevail upon him to desist with his work. “He said to me, ‘I bet you wouldn’t cut off my finger if I asked you’. He got on my nerves eventually. I said, ‘if I’m looking for spiritual guidance from you, you’ll be the first to hear about it.’ It was a polite way of telling him to f**k off. That was around 1980.”
Through the 1980s, he involved himself
in the evolving debate around contraceptive and abortion rights. “The contraceptive issue — Charlie Haughey’s Irish solution to an Irish problem
— I took that on head on. That was 1983 and at the same time the whole proLife thing was being stirred up.” Although contraception was banned between 1935 and 1979, Rynne says it was not truly illegal but merely “morally objectionable to some people” (women could have the Pill prescribed in limited circumstances — if they could convince a doctor that they had heavy or irregular periods), and he freely prescribed it. He was opposed to the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, inserted in 1983 after torrid debate, which placed the life of the mother and the foetus on an equal footing. The amendment had passed by a huge majority and Rynne was one of the few medics who publicly opposed it.
“Abortion is a difficult one but I realised that either you legalise abortion or you have backstreet abortions. I would never be a promoter of abortion but I am a promoter of civil rights and women’s right to choose to have an abortion for whatever reason they find necessary. I always referred them to England to safe places to have them.” He remembers the 1990s as a time of great social change, when the country began to slowly align itself more closely with his views. “Even something like divorce could hardly be discussed without getting yourself into trouble and now things have changed totally. It only took two or three referenda but we got it right in the end.
“I couldn’t believe the result of the vote on the Eighth Amendment but everything was going wrong for the pro-Life campaign after the terrible situation with Savita Halappanavar. The amendment was causing confusion and it should never have been put in there in the first place. Vindication was the word that came to mind.”
In the 1990s, he also focused on building up Clane hospital (now UPMC Kildare), which he founded, and which specialises mainly in surgical procedures.
He had married Ann Hughes in 1968 and the couple had two children but by 2000 the relationship had broken down and they divorced. He remarried but his new wife, Joan, passed away about three-and-a-half years ago. He’s now in a relationship “with a wonderful woman”, Ramona.
His relationship with his father also improved after the excommunication attempt.
“We had a very good relationship, we patched up our differences within six months or so. I brought him hyacinths that Christmas which he loved. My mother, to
her lasting credit, would have said ‘those are his [Andrew’s] views and he is entitled to them’.”
In latter years he has continued to
campaign on controversial issues, including fluoridation of drinking water. “I tried to get a barrister to take it on as a judicial review but I couldn’t find anyone to do it, and it needs to be taken on because we have a right to bodily integrity in this country and a right not to take medicine and fluoride to prevent tooth decay and so, by the definition of the State itself, it is a medicine. You shouldn’t be forced to take it. It seems to affect people’s brains, but that’s very difficult to prove in a court of law, or even in conversation, as people think you’re paranoid.”
His opinions may make him something of an uncomfortable figure for a liberal movement that once lionised him. He has been appalled, for instance, at elements of the official response to the coronavirus pandemic and voices opinions that widely diverge from the scientific consensus on masks and the vaccines.
“I think human rights are being walked all over,” he begins. “I understand I’m taking a risk saying this, but I feel our hardwon freedoms have been stripped away for no good reason. Having to wear a mask is a violation of bodily integrity... When we get to the point where you have to get a vaccine to get on a flight, there will be a huge resistance, I hope.”
In fact, the 78-year-old says he has had coronavirus, having self-diagnosed before testing became widely available. “It was a doddle. I had flu-like symptoms and I was stuck in bed for a few days. I may have some kind of immunity now, but we don’t know. There is a lot about Covid-19 we don’t know yet.”
There is a sense his views are driven by the same questioning impulse that once made him one of this country’s lonely voices of opposition against theocratic interference. He no longer practises medicine but says, despite this, he feels no less of a doctor. His health has been good since his bout with the virus.
“I’m extremely lucky. I don’t actually believe in God, so I can’t be grateful to him, but I am grateful for the life I have, because a lot of my friends are dead, which happens when you get into your 70s. I hope I go on a little bit longer.”
Even something like divorce could hardly have been discussed without getting into trouble and now things have changed totally... we got it right in the end