Peter Boylan - In the Shadow of the Eighth: My Forty Years Working for Womens Health in Ireland

For Jane

In 1973, when I was a student doctor doing the required eight-week obstetrics rotation at Holles Street, the hospital had three antenatal wards, each with around twenty beds. One of these wards was solely for women who were known as inuptas, from the Latin for unmarried; at the time almost a quarter of all births to unmarried mothers in the Republic of Ireland took place in Holles Street. The majority of these women came in from Mother and Baby Homes to have their babies. I recall mention of homes in Eglinton Road and Dunboyne, and some of them must also have come from Magdalene Laundries.

As my career progressed, and as I grew as a person and as a doctor, I came to question why we treated women this way. But as a young doctor in training I did not wonder about the effective segregation of these women in the National Maternity Hospital, and neither did anyone else; unconsciously, most of us had absorbed the norms of the time. I might have thought I was worldly, but, as a young man who came from a solidly middle-class Dublin background, I had had no exposure to a side of Irish life that was harsh, judgemental and punitive.

I was born on 7 July 1950, the youngest of four children, following Hugo, Anna and Kate. I did not thrive in my first few weeks I would vomit my feed up to several feet away, a dramatic and alarming symptom known as projectile vomiting. This led to dehydration and malnutrition, and at six weeks old I was dangerously ill. My mother, who had trained as a nurse and was not inclined to kowtow to doctors, or indeed anyone else, did not feel that our GP was taking the matter seriously enough. She phoned Colman Saunders, a consultant paediatrician, and described my symptoms. He immediately diagnosed pyloric stenosis, a condition present from birth, caused by blockage of the stomach by an overgrowth of muscle. He referred me urgently to John Shanley, the first specialist paediatric surgeon in Ireland, who operated successfully.

As a young schoolboy, when I felt like a day off, I used my infant surgery to my advantage, saying that I had a pain in my tummy around the scar. I would be allowed to stay at home for the day, resting in bed, as my mother brought me orange juice and the Dandy and Beano comics. Of course, she knew perfectly well that I was playing up, but, as the youngest of her children, and the one who had nearly died, I was somewhat indulged.

My mother, Patricia Clancy, was born in 1913, in Coalisland, County Tyrone, the tenth of twelve children. After school she followed her elder sister Mena to Leeds General Infirmary, now St Jamess University Hospital, where she spent four years training. In 1937 she persuaded her retired parents to move from Belfast to Dublin, and that same year she auditioned successfully for the Abbey School of Acting. For over twenty-five years she was a regular on Austin Clarkes Monday-evening programmes of poetry readings on Radio ireann.

My father, Henry always Harry in the family was a civil servant, at that time in the Land Commission, and he took the train most mornings from our home in Dundrum to Harcourt Street, usually managing a game of poker on the short journey with four other young men, regular commuters.

My parents had married in 1941, my father having fallen in love with my mothers voice, speaking verse on Radio ireann, and declaring that he must meet the owner of that voice. And in his determined way he did. As children, we would gather round the radio with my father and listen to her disembodied voice a great source of wonder. I have a clear memory of lying on a rug, peering at the radio, which was on the floor, listening to my mother reading poetry, and wondering how on earth she was able to make herself so small as to fit inside the radio.

My father came from a long line of mariners, going back at least to the mid 1700s. There is a graveyard at Mornington at the mouth of the River Boyne where headstones record the lives of numerous Boylan seafarers. Among them is a Captain Peter Boylan, born in 1833, the son and grandson of pilots of Drogheda harbour and port who owned a 65-ton pilot boat called Gazelle. My great-grandfather Captain William Boylan sailed his own 84-ton schooner called The Eagle, along the coast of France and Spain, into the Mediterranean and through the Sea of Marmara as far as Constantinople (now Istanbul), bringing cargos of linen from the nearby mills and returning with spices and silks from the East. In 1879 he slipped and fell while boarding his ship in Bordeaux. He had died by the time the ship docked in Drogheda. It was the end of the Boylan shipping line, but not the end of the family love of seafaring.

My grandfather Captain John Boylan followed in the family tradition and went to sea at sixteen, but, as there was no family schooner for him to take over, he shipped in Liverpool on the Dun Cow, a three-masted tea-clipper that he went on to captain, and that journeyed on trading routes from Drogheda, around Cape Horn, to San Francisco and back. As my father recalled in his memoir, A Voyage around My Life, those were the days of wooden ships and iron men [when] one had to be strong, active, hardy and fearless.

On leaving school, my father, too, would have gone to sea, like two of his elder brothers, but the Great Depression and the collapse of international trade and shipping meant that there were no opportunities for a newcomer. There was no money for university, and he did not want to join a bank or insurance company. Nor did he want to teach (I did not want to be a National Teacher under the jurisdiction of a parish priest, he wrote later). Instead he sat the highly competitive civil service exams and joined the Land Commission. The sea was in his blood, however, as it is in mine. He taught me to sail at the age of seven and I have been enjoying it ever since.

I started school in Ardtona House, a small school run by Judy Rogerson in her family home on Lower Churchtown Road. The school is still there. At seven I moved to St Marys College in Rathmines, chosen largely because my father had been in school with the then head of the College, Fr Paddy Murray, and so the decision was an easy one. By this time we were living in Orwell Park in Rathgar, and I took the No. 14 bus to school every day from the end of the road.

I enjoyed my time at St Marys enormously, playing countless games of rugby in the winter, and cricket, tennis and basketball in the summer. Towards the end of junior school my academic performance began to slip significantly, and my father threatened to send me to board at Rockwell College in County Tipperary if I didnt pull my socks up. This did not appeal at all. I had run away from Cub camp, hating the discomforts of camping compared to the comforts of home, and did not intend to repeat the experience. The threat of Rockwell worked like a dream. Within two terms I had progressed sufficiently to be transferred from the B class into the A stream.

Rugby was central to my life. I won a Leinster Schools Senior Cup Medal in 1965, while still in fourth year. The next year we were beaten by Blackrock College in the final. In 1967 I was captain, and hoped to lead a successful campaign. Disastrously, however, we were beaten in the first round by Gonzaga not then known for success in rugby in a sudden-death play-off, having drawn with them twice. Friends who went to Gonzaga, and others, never tire of reminding me of that defeat, more than fifty years later. Character-building stuff. I played for Leinster Schools in fifth and sixth year, and Leinster under-19s and 21s while in college.