Dr Michael Flynn, who died last weekend aged 85, was a former medical officer with the General Medical Services Payments Board, a programme manager in the Midland Health Board and a county medical officer in Roscommon and Westmeath.
As a council member of the Irish Medical Association for 23 years and its president in 1964, he played a key role in improving relations between the medical profession and government in the 1960s. He introduced many innovative schemes in public health services and was a leading advocate on behalf of Travellers and the rights of adopted children and their parents.
Michael Paul Flynn was born on June 30th, 1917, at Skerries House, near Athy, Co Kildare, the youngest of the seven children of James Flynn and Nora Masterson who ran an extensive farm north of Athy.
He attended the town CBS school, went to UCD to study medicine in 1934 and graduated at the start of the second World War. He then went to work in England, mainly in bomb-blitzed Coventry.
He returned to Dublin in 1943, gained first-class honours in the Diploma in Public Health and was offered a two-year research fellowship into typhoid for the Medical Research Council based at the Bacteriological Department at UCD. In 1945 he enlisted with the newly established United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and was deployed to Germany where he worked with the displaced, refugees and survivors of the nearby Belsen prison camp. He was later appointed medical director of the Hannover province in the British occupied zone. His experiences of managing epidemics and outbreaks of cholera, dysentery, typhus and tuberculosis encouraged his growing interest in public health and immunisation.
In 1947 Mike Flynn took up an appointment as assistant county medical officer in Offaly and later moved to Roscommon and then Mullingar as CMO in 1954. In the same year he was elected to the central council of the Irish Medical Association (IMA). He served on the IMA executive committee for 17 years up to 1978 and played a key role in improving relations between the profession and the government, especially with Sean MacEntee and his successor as minister for health, Donogh O'Malley.
As IMA president in 1964, Mike Flynn encouraged closer co-operation between the doctors' body in the Republic and the Northern Ireland branch of the British Medical Association. In 1965 O'Malley appointed him to the Medico-Social Research Board, and he later played an active part in the preparations for the 1970 Health Act, which established the eight regional health boards that now face major restructuring. His research work on TB had led to his appointment to the Mass Radiography Board in 1959 and in 1963 UCD awarded him an MD degree for his published work and research papers, many of which appeared in Tubercle, the Lancet and the British Medical Journal.
He continued to seek out innovations having initiated boarding out for ambulant older people with families who received modest payments to care for them. Other initiatives included introducing IQ assessments for school children; promoting foster care for children in orphanages and institutions; and, controversially, running anti-smoking campaigns when many doctors dismissed any link with lung cancer.
He became deeply involved in securing housing for Traveller families, often helping them to buy modest homes with the assistance of the Society of St Vincent the Paul when the local authorities obstructed their efforts to secure public housing.
He became an active member of the National Council for Travelling People and in 1981 was appointed to the government's Travelling People Review Body. Up to his death he regretted that so many local authorities and other agencies had failed to secure the rights of Travellers to decent accommodation, believing that it was the key to social integration, a concept now less popular with some Traveller activists.
Following his "retirement" in 1982 he was approached by his friend, Joe Robins, an assistant secretary in the Department of Health, to become a member of the Adoption Board. Sadly, Joe predeceased Mike by six days.
For five years he was energetic in modernising its functions. In 1986, aged 69, he was invited to become Medical Officer to the GMS Payments Board and over six active years travelled the country advising general practitioners and pharmacists on the correct procedures for claiming payments. Visiting roughly 160 GPs a year he found a small number who abused the system, either for personal greed or due to an addiction or health problem, with a few practices having to make repayments and refunds of up to £90,000 (€114,000).
He combined his research skills over the past 10 years producing a series of genealogical booklets and family histories on a wide network of relatives and in-laws. This writing interest culminated in the publication of his autobiography, Medical Doctor of Many Parts, last October.
His wife, Patricia, and their four children, Gerald, Noreen, Fergal and Mo, and grandchildren survive him.
Mike Flynn: born June 30th, 1917; died, January 17th, 2003.