Obituary: Margaret Chamberlain

Moving force behind right-to-die case in the late 1990s

Margaret Chamberlain, who died in Dublin, aged 96, was the moving force behind a "right-to-die" case in the late 1990s. Her determination that her daughter Lucy, who had been in a permanent vegetative state for 23 years, be allowed to die had led her to the High Court and Supreme Court. Both courts agreed with her.

Margaret was born in 1920 to Joseph MacMenamin and Mary Corcoran who themselves had been born in London in the 1870s and who moved to Dublin having been inspired by a speech by Arthur Griffith at a Gaelic League meeting.

Joseph launched the Central Tie Company which made men’s ties and Mary started a lady’s nightwear and underwear business called Cetecia. The businesses, in Drury Street, Dublin, flourished for many decades.

She was educated at Scoil Bhríde in Earlsfort Terrace and subsequently at Loreto Abbey, Rathfarnham. She obtained a degree in Irish and English at University College Dublin, followed by a H Dip.

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Met on train

She taught for a short time before she married, in 1946, Tom Chamberlain whom she had met on the train to Lough Derg and who had played rugby for Blackrock College and UCD and had been capped for

Ireland

during the second World War.

He was an accountant, was secretary to the Irish Car Rental Association and the Irish Horse Drawn Caravan Association and was involved in starting the Irish Hotels Federation.

They had seven children, but tragedy occurred in 1972 when their 22-year-old daughter Lucy suffered global, irreversible brain damage during a minor investigatory procedure.

In an article in The Irish Times in 1996, Margaret wrote that the family had not received a clear explanation as to what had happened and why.

Her husband died in 1988 at the age of 70. His family believed his daughter’s tragedy contributed to his early death.

Lucy spent 23 years in institutions and Margaret Chamberlain became increasingly unhappy at the determination of these bodies, run by religious orders, to keep Lucy alive in a vegetative state in which she often showed signs of distress.

She subsequently decided to apply to the courts for Lucy’s right to die. Her decision was prompted by the case of Tony Bland, a young Liverpool supporter left in a vegetative state following the Hillsborough Stadium disaster in 1989.

Consulted theologians

Following Lucy’s tragedy, she had attended courses in which she explored her faith, her relationship with God and the Catholic Church. She consulted theologians and was satisfied that allowing Lucy to die, by withdrawing nutrition she was receiving through a tube in her stomach, was allowable from a Catholic standpoint. But her driving force, she explained in the High Court in 1995, was “the lived experience of observing Lucy in such a diminished state over such a prolonged period of time”.

When the High Court found in favour of her application, the judgment was appealed to the Supreme Court by the Attorney General, supported by the institution in which Lucy was resident (which cannot be named for legal reasons) and by the guardian ad litem.

The Supreme Court supported the High Court judgment. However, statements by the Medical Council and An Bord Altranais left doctors and nurses fearful of implementing the family’s wishes. At the same time, the institution was putting pressure on the family to remove Lucy from their care.

Finally, she brought her daughter home where a volunteer team of one doctor and eight nurses, whose names were kept confidential, took care of Lucy while she died.

"On the morning of the eighth day, she simply stopped breathing," she later wrote in The Irish Times. "I can say, without fear of contradiction, that her eight days of dying were more peaceful than the previous 23 years of so-called living."

The period of her life following Lucy’s death included frequent visits to Australia, France, the US and England to visit her children, as well as many trips to opera and the theatre.

She is survived by her children Tom, Ally, Paul, Clare, Sarah and Ruth and by her sons-in-law, daughters-in-law, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.