Oh how we still idolise the consultant classes!
THE rancorous atmosphere at the latest Holles Street board meeting caught Dublin Lord Mayor Brendan Carr by surprise. Hostile, tense and disdainful of Dr Peter Boylan was how the life-long trade union leader, who has seen his share of dogfights, described the mood around the top table. Hardly a surprise, perhaps, given the public tantrums over the hospital’s relocation to St Vincent’s, but a mood to which Dr Boylan, the former master of the hospital and the country’s most celebrated gynaecologist, has lately grown accustomed.
A man who radiates the stately self-possession of one who has met with little but warm approval if not adulation all his life, Dr Boylan took refuge from the bruising storms of bitter infighting to give an interview to the Irish Times.
Sitting in his Ranelagh garden, the silky voiced obstetrician magnanimously declared that he didn’t bear any ‘personal animus’ towards the Holles Street figures who had ‘vilified’ him.
Whether those on the other side of the fence about the future of Holles Street give two figs for his display of grace under fire is one thing – it’s rather more likely that they are turning as green as hospital scrubs with envy at his public deification.
If Dr Boylan’s intervention in the Savita Halappanavar tragedy put him on a pedestal in the minds of right-on thinkers, then his protest about a potential religious ethos in the new maternity hospital has earned him lavish praise for his courage and elevated him to secular sainthood.
By highlighting the Sisters of Charity’s ownership of the hospital, he has taken a stand for which in time, who knows, we may all be eternally grateful.
BUT to reward him with heroic panegyrics is way over the top – even by our normal standards of prostrating ourselves to top people. Dr Boylan is a member of our most cosseted profession, whose stranglehold on the health service is viewed in some quarters as at least partly to blame for its dysfunctional state.
Explaining on radio his original refusal to resign from the Holles Street board – a decision which he subsequently thought the better of – he said he felt ‘loyalty to the women of Ireland’.
Even for a member of the elite consultant class, where qualities of arrogance and condescension wrapped up in a God complex seem never in short supply, it came across as an extravagant display of egotism.
It was also a reflection of our patriarchal birth industry, a rigid hierarchy which, up until recently, was wholly dominated by men.
Dr Boylan is gifted; his expertise has saved the lives of many mothers and babies. But he is not the saviour of women. And it’s women who, in most cases deliver babies into the world – not consultants. We need top class maternity hospitals, fertility clinics and all their ancillary profitable businesses. But we also need community midwives, doulas and services that so healthy young women with no pregnancy complications have more childbirth choices.
Not all the women of Ireland want to be walked through their childbearing years by a consultant, even one as debonair as Mr Boylan.
But you wouldn’t know that in the past week amid the outcry about untrammelled clinical practice in maternity care.
Thanks to Church scandals and liberalism, younger generations in particular are loud in their disdain for religious orders, even though their influence is on the slide.
Ironically it’s often those who shout the loudest about separation of Church and State who want to replace the Church with the new religion of secularism, which is every bit as stultifyingly conformist. They worship smooth-talking flagbearing liberals in the same unquestioning way as bishops and monsignors once were feted. They hang on to their every word as evidence of their wisdom and understanding. The danger is that, as with Church figures of old, we place our faith and trust in them, rather than in ourselves.