Radiologist on €250,000 scholarship 'felt dehumanised' at her treatment in Dublin

A RADIOLOGIST who availed of a four-year scholarship to Ireland but then did not return to work in Kenya, as agreed in advance, compared her stay in Dublin to a bad marriage yesterday.

Speaking by video-link from Washington, where she is currently specialising in body imaging, Dr Irene Mwangi told the Medical Council Fitness to practise committee that “it started out with great vision and expectation, but gradually, during my four years in Dublin, I felt used and misused and I wanted to get out of it .”

Dr Mwangi was answering questions regarding a €250,000 scholarship under which she had undertaken to return to work for five years at the Mater hospital in Nairobi, as well as the university there, and to mentor voluntary work. Instead, on the day she was to begin work in Nairobi – August 1st, 2008 – she took up a post at the University of California hospital in San Diego without informing her scholarship sponsors in Dublin or the hospital authorities in Nairobi.

Dr Mwangi was funded to study for a radiology fellowship at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland through a trust set up by Joseph Linders in memory of his late wife. Participants in the scholarship scheme are given to understand they will work for five years at a Nairobi hospital after the course. Two others who have since availed of the scholarship returned to work in medicine in Kenya.

“It was a disgrace, the way I was treated in Dublin,” Dr Mwangi said. “I felt dehumanised. It was a disgrace as well to have threatened me with deportation,” she told the committee.

She felt “very, very alienated” and “became extremely fearful”. “I did feel threatened . . . my physical safety. They were probably dangerous people, in my opinion,” she said. She also felt she was treated “less than others; I was inferior to others.”

She felt “treated in a demeaning manner” on having her allowance raised in March 2005, and was told it was what girls of college age received in Ireland. In June 2006, a doctor at the Royal College of Surgeons became “visibly annoyed, his face was red and he was shaking” when she inquired about studying for a fifth year.

“He said if he ever heard mention of a fifth year again I was not going to stay another day in Ireland, but would be deported immediately,” she said. Later he “scuttled” her chances of studying at a hospital in Boston, she said.

She agreed with Peter Mooney of the committee that she had decided not to return to Kenya by December 2007. She agreed that after that she sought a written opinion from lawyers in Nairobi, and it stated that the memo of understanding she had signed on taking up the scholarship was not a legally binding document.

The hearing continues.