The Vasectomy Doctor (19 page)

In the end it was these people who won out and the Irish Family Planning Association became fully compliant, or at least as compliant as possible, with the provisions of the Health (Family Planning) Act 1979. I had little choice but to accede to the majority view. A pharmacy division was established within the organisation and a full-time pharmacist was employed to oversee it. In this way the doctors could ‘write' prescriptions for condoms and our pharmacist could ‘dispense' them. In practice however prescriptions were written in bulk and the condoms were dispensed by whoever happened to be around at the time. But in theory at least we were compliant and it looked well and in any case there was never any attempt to enforce this law as the government did not need any embarrassing prosecutions.

This was so typically Irish but madly frustrating for all of that. We had an unworkable piece of legislation that shamelessly ex
ploited people seeking to be responsible about family planning
; everyone was breaking the law in all but spirit and nobody did anything to change it.

Outside of the IFPA it was difficult to know what we could do to challenge this wretched legislation. Dr Sheila Jones and I organised a petition with the signatures of some 260 doctors across Ireland saying that they were strongly opposed to this new law and that they would not cooperate. We drummed up as much publicity as we could and on 11 March 1982 delivered our letter to Dáil Éireann to Dr Michael Woods' secretary. Woods was minister for Health at this stage and Haughey, prime minister. It may not seem like much now but to get 260 doctors in Ireland to agree to anything was quite an achievement. But the thing got very little media attention and of course I am still waiting to hear back from Dr Woods.

As time went on it began to dawn on me that the only way to bring embarrassing outside attention to this miserable legislation and thus have it changed was to go out and deliberately break the law. Since there was no effort being made to enforce it in the first place breaking it would have to be done in a very formal and documented way. The situation required some bottle. In July 1982 I asked a friend of mine, Robert Sheridan, to play a cameo role for me in this charade. He would come into my surgery at half past six in the evening and ask me for a package of ten condoms. I was then to sell him these directly and contrary to the provisions of Mr Haughey's Health (Family Planning) Act 1979. My ‘excuse' for doing it this way was that the local pharmacy closed at 6 p.m. and I did not want my client to risk causing an unwanted pregnancy. I was to issue Mr Sheridan with a receipt for the money he paid me and this, along with a covering letter, would be sent off to the DPP for his consideration. This forced the government to act through its own DPP. Much as they may have wanted to do otherwise they simply could not ignore me.

We then sat back wondering what would happen next. After about two weeks the gardaí phoned me and asked if it would be all right if they ‘raided' my surgery sometime as there had been a complaint made against me. I said that there would be no need for that, that they could come down here anytime they liked and that I would
give them whatever they wanted. Such compliance among the crimi
nal classes must be rare. A day or so later two burly gardaí arrived and I gave them a few packets of condoms and a receipt book showing that I had indeed been selling condoms directly to people contrary to the provisions of you know what. Then it was just a question of waiting another week or so for the summons to arrive.

* * *

During these years a group of four of us – James Egan, James O'Dwyer, Peter Cunningham and myself – used to take land for rough shooting down in Carlow, halfway between Rathvilly and Hackettstown. This land was for the most part poor for farming but ideal for snipe and released pheasants shooting. Two men used to look after things down there for us. We called them the ‘Two Billys'. These men reared a few pheasants for us and came out with us, with their dogs, to keep the farmers sweet and, as best they could, to keep poachers away. The system worked very well for a good few years but the farmers were constantly improving their lands through drainage. This, while no doubt improving the land, left it unsuitable for snipe-shooting. As well as that it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep the farmers on our side and a time came when the thing became untenable.

But when it was working well we would go down to Carlow maybe four or five times during the shooting season, arriving at an appointed gateway at around 9.30 a.m. having stopped off for breakfast on the way down. We would then shoot until 12.30 or so, at which stage someone would deem it time for lunch which was, often as not, partaken of in a local hostelry called the Tobanstown Inn. In those days most country pubs did not serve any food at all so we would bring our own. By the time we'd get back to the Two Billys we would, as they say, be feeling very little pain.

After one such excellent lunch I remember we were taken onto a large field of sugar beet not yet harvested. This kind of a crop is great for holding pheasants particularly if it is a bit weedy. The pointer was sent out in front of the guns and the Two Billys followed behind. The pointer ranged right to left and left to right across the guns, her nose held close to the ground all the while trying to pick up a scent on this winter's day. Suddenly the dog stops dead in her tracks as if struck by lightning. She is petrified and statuesque. Her head is cocked slightly to one side, her front left paw is held off the ground, her tail is held out behind her as straight as a die. All the guns know that there is a cock pheasant somewhere about ten feet in front of the dog's nose and ready themselves accordingly. Dog and bird are going through their ancient ritualistic stand off.

Then the pointer begins to wag her tail in the horizontal plane, the tip moving two inches each way. This is a sure sign that the pheasant is about to move which is exactly what happens. The dog now breaks her set and moves slowly forward, crouched down. This
is where you need a good steady dog. It is vital that the pointer keeps
her distance behind the running pheasant otherwise he will break out of range of the guns and that is no good. The chase is on. The pointer moves on up the field in pursuit of the unseen bird. Peter Cunningham, who happens to be nearest to the action, takes off up the field after the running pheasant and crouched down pointer. This trio move forward from the rest of us by some 200 yards.

And then they all stop dead. The pheasant presumably has stopped running, the pointer goes in to her setting routine once more and Peter gets ready to take his shot. Suddenly the cock pheasant breaks out and he is up and off giving a bit of a crow out of himself, as he gets airborne. We are looking at all of this from the bottom of the field. We see the pheasant take off ten yards in front of Peter. We see him put the gun to his shoulder, see the smoke leave the end of his barrels, hear the two shots go off and see the pheasant fly on untouched. We have all missed easy birds like this before; it is part of the fun. But Peter made it even funnier. Having missed the bird he flings his shotgun onto the ground and starts jumping up and down on it. I don't think that any of us ever laughed more than we did that winter's afternoon down in Carlow with the Two Billys and after a good lunch in the Tobanstown Inn.

* * *

The summons, when it eventually arrived, demanded my presence in Naas district court on 23 December 1982. At this stage I was receiving quite a lot of ‘free' legal aid from my good friends in the legal business and some kind of constitutional challenge along the lines of the McGee case was being mooted. If we could have established that Mr Sheridan's constitutional rights to privacy were being violated then such a course would have the effect of my being acquitted and the law being declared unconstitutional thus killing two birds with the one stone. But since Mr Sheridan was not married at the time this seemed to weaken our case. Anyway, the upshot of the whole thing was that when 23 December came along, we asked for and received an adjournment thus winning a six-month stay of execution.

Our next outing to Naas district court took place on Monday, 22 June 1983. By this time we had decided that an appeal to the High Court on constitutional grounds was too risky, too expensive and would be too long drawn out. We wanted the law on the sale of condoms to be changed quickly and the best way to achieve that was to run the case and embarrass the government as much as possible. The case was to be heard in front of Justice Johnston and I was to defend myself. The only danger here was that I would be found guilty but given the Probation Act. That, after all, would have been a perfectly reasonable course for Justice Johnston to take given that this was my first offence. Had that happened we would have been left dead in the water and the whole thing would have been a bit of a damp squib. Here again I had a bit of luck on my side.

The state solicitor Mr Coonan, in the course of his cross-examination of Mr Sheridan, asked him what he wanted the condoms for. This quite extraordinary question caused a titter of laughter to go
around the courthouse much to the clear annoyance of Your Honour.
Things were going from bad to worse and it was my turn next. The state solicitor then asked me why I thought it necessary to break the law. This set me off on a diatribe on how ridiculous I felt the law was and how it was unworkable and so on. I was just getting into second gear when Justice Johnston abruptly interrupted me asking that I desist immediately and sit down and that he would not have ‘his court' used by anyone to score political points. And there I was thinking that the courts belonged to the people.

Clearly very annoyed, which was just how we needed him to be, the judge then asked Mr Coonan what the maximum fine was that he could impose. After a bit of thumb-licking through the statutes the state solicitor came back with the answer that I already knew to be the case: ‘£500, Your Honour.'

‘Right,' says Justice Johnston, ‘£500 it is then or twenty-eight days in prison in default of payment.'

I could have applauded the judge and the state solicitor right there and then only that I thought it might be churlish to do so. But this was exactly the result that I wanted and Your Honour had played a blinder.

Outside, in front of several TV and media cameras, I said that I
felt it quite extraordinary that a doctor should be fined £500 for prac
tising medicine according to his conscience, that what happened inside the court-room just now was the natural consequences of Mr Haughey's so-called Irish solution to the Irish problem, that I would continue to sell condoms directly to people where I thought that such action was appropriate and that I would rot in prison before I would pay one penny of a fine that I believed to be wholly unjust – all very bullish stuff.

At this stage we had the option of leaving it at that, of not appealing against conviction or fine, not paying the fine and putting it up to the state to imprison me. This way I would have been the only doctor ever to be imprisoned for selling a package of ten condoms and embarrassment to the government would have been considerable. But there were a number of potential flaws to this approach. My wife and family were naturally hesitant and apprehensive about it, there was always the danger that some ‘third party' would pay the fine on my behalf thus killing the whole thing off and in any event we had made our point and enough was enough. Taking all this into consideration the prevailing wisdom was to keep the thing alive and to appeal.

My final invitation to appear at Naas district court came a few months later and on 7 December of that same year I appeared before Mr Justice Frank Roe on appeal. At this hearing I asked a colleague, Dr Derek Freedman, a consultant in sexually transmitted diseases, to give evidence on my behalf. After a lengthy hearing during which we were given every chance to make our case Judge Roe summed up the whole thing as ‘a storm in a teacup'. By this he meant that if people needed condoms in the evening or over a weekend when the local pharmacy shop might be closed then all they need do was to exercise some restraint and ‘wait until Monday'. He gave me the Probation Act on the grounds that it was my first offence, the fine was lifted and that was that. Nearly all the papers the next day bore headlines based on ‘Wait Until Monday'. Some months later Justice Frank Roe, who was himself a keen amateur jockey, named one of his horses ‘Wait Until Monday' which showed that the man at least had some sense of humour if not a very pro
found grasp of human sexual behaviour. The horse did quite well too.

I had many friends and great support throughout all of this farce. Dr Paddy Leahy and Dr Jim Loughran were both GPs who had pioneered for the kind of human rights that I was now campaigning for many years before I came on the plot. They and many other GP
colleagues supported me all the way. The Irish Family Planning Asso
ciation was incredibly supportive notwithstanding the fact that it would lose out financially in the event of condoms becoming more freely available. To this day I have a drawer full of letters of support from all over Ireland and indeed all over the world. I had my detractors too, of course, but they were in the minority. One lady from Birmingham sent me a package of used condoms asking if this was the kind of filth that I wanted to bring into Ireland.

In any case what matters is that it worked. Within a few weeks of the Roe hearing the now minister for Health, Barry Desmond, asked for a meeting with us, the directors of the IFPA, to explore our views on his proposed amendments to the Family Planning Act. These were to virtually deregulate the sale of condoms making them freely available through chemists' shops and vending machines in men's public toilets. During this meeting I mentioned to the minister that I was on probation for selling a package of condoms. The minister replied that he was fully aware of that fact and that this gave a certain urgency to these proposed new amendments. Within a few weeks they were written into law and that was that.