Maurice Neligan:MAURICE NELIGAN, who has died aged 73, was a pioneering heart surgeon estimated to have carried out up to 15,000 operations during his career.
He was responsible for two major firsts in Irish medicine: in 1975 he performed the first coronary bypass graft at Dublin’s Mater hospital, and in 1985 was part of the team that carried out the Republic’s first heart transplant operation.
Recalling the latter operation, he said: “We really did it off our own bat. We did not get any help from the Department of Health or anything like that. In fact, not long after the first transplants, the Mater stopped the programme during the cutbacks in the late 1980s.”
Freddie Wood, consultant heart surgeon at the Mater hospital, said Maurice Neligan was the outstanding surgeon of his generation, and that his major legacy was the development of heart surgery for children.
Consultant oncologist John Crown said Mr Neligan had been an inspiration to younger doctors.
Born in 1937, he grew up in Booterstown, Co Dublin, and attended Blackrock College. He had happy memories of his years there, saying it was like being part of a very large family. He was also struck by the “great sense of togetherness”.
He studied medicine at University College Dublin, and after graduating in 1962 went to work at the Mater hospital. He joined Eoin O’Malley and Keith Shaw at the national cardiac surgical centre in the hospital in 1971.
He was consultant cardiac surgeon at Crumlin’s children’s hospital from 1974 until 2002, and also was one of the founders of the Blackrock Clinic.
A colleague recalled last week how Mr Neligan “never once refused a referral, and he never once inquired if the patient he was asked to see was public or private”.
Dr Muiris Houston in this newspaper described how when he operated on a patient, the person invariably felt they had gotten to know him. “He put people at ease. They also sensed an underlying kindness and a palpable concern for their wellbeing.”
Maurice Neligan was a vocal critic of government health policy: “We have a system that is inequitable; there is no question about that. I think we need universal health insurance, and it needn’t be a case of public versus private. The money should follow the patient.”
He considered co-location to be socially divisive: “It’s a case of drive through the gates and are you in the rich or the poor hospital?”
His involvement in the private Blackrock Clinic was primarily driven by a waiting list crisis that developed at the Mater during the 1980s.
His reasoning was that if people were dying while waiting for cardiac surgery, those with private health insurance could be cared for at a new state-of-the-art facility.
This would allow a greater number of public patients to be operated on in the Mater.
More recently he complained that people were being driven into private medicine, saying that private medicine cherrypicks and did not cater for the “complicated long-stay patients”.
He disagreed with the argument that Irish consultants were well paid compared to their counterparts elsewhere.
“I would have a problem with a system whereby everybody is paid the same no matter what they do. There are elements of medicine that are more time-consuming and stressful than others.”
He did not always subscribe to the conventional wisdom of his profession, and in 1993 attacked what he termed “margarine fanatics”.
Mr Neligan said there was no proof whatsoever that a person consuming a normal intake of whole foods, such as meat and dairy products, was vulnerable to coronary disease.
Three years later he said that a healthy lifestyle in itself was not a guarantee of a healthy heart. Other factors contributed to heart disease, and his advice to patients was to “lead a reasonable, normal, moderate life and . . . forget about your heart”.
In 2002 he was named as the holder of an Ansbacher account, although the authorities accepted that his money, lodged with Guinness & Mahon, was moved into the account without his knowledge.
He acknowledged maintaining a separate offshore account in the Isle of Man during the early 1980s. He told inspectors the money in this account, earned from overseas patients, was not known to the Revenue at the time, but was later disclosed under the 1993 tax amnesty. He said he put money overseas at a time of extremely high taxation. “I did what I shouldn’t have done, but what a lot of other people also did.”
In 2007 tragedy struck when his daughter Sara was murdered. Her passing, he wrote, left a void in his family’s hearts “which the most loving memories can fill only inadequately”.
In recent years he wrote a column for The Irish Timeshealth supplement Healthplus.
Very popular with readers, “HeartBeat” mixed polemic and commentary with some lyrical descriptions of the family’s holiday home in Kerry.
In July he explained why he no longer supported the Mater site for the national children’s hospital: “We can do better, and in view of the fact this . . . is about all the sick children of Ireland, not just Dublin, let’s look for a greenfield site, spacious and easy of access.”
A keen golfer, he was a past president of Dooks golf club in Kerry. He was also an avid reader.
Mr Neligan is survived by his wife Mary Patricia, daughters Kate, Lisa and Lucy, and sons Maurice, John and David.
Maurice Christopher Neligan: born May 15th, 1937; died October 8th, 2010