A MAN abused by the former Drogheda surgeon Michael Shine when he attended an outpatient appointment at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in the late 1980s told yesterday of how his life had been ruined by what occurred.
The then 17-year-old, who attended the doctor with an upper body injury, was sexually assaulted by Shine.
He couldn't bring himself to tell anyone about what happened for a long time.
"It took me a number of years to go and do something about it. I was very angry and confused," he recalled.
Eventually, when it was "eating away" at him, he confided in his family who reported the matter to the Garda in the early 1990s.
It took years for progress to be made. Shine went to the courts to try to stop a criminal trial and, when the trial eventually went ahead, he was acquitted. Then an attempt by the Medical Council to inquire into his fitness to practise was delayed by further legal action initiated by Shine.
But finally yesterday, when the Medical Council decision to find Shine guilty of professional misconduct and strike his name off the medical register was rubber-stamped by the High Court, it came as a relief to this victim, who had given evidence to the medical council's fitness to practise inquiry.
"There is a big part of me happy and big part of me angry because it's taken so long to reach this point.
"Why could he not have admitted what he did rather than put us through so much pain for so many years," he said.
"This news now is just the best news you could get because somebody has listened to us and has seen the real person that he [Shine] is," he said.
"He has ruined an awful lot of peoples' lives . . . it's just destroyed our lives. It's ruined my life. It's just consumed my life. It will be there till the day I die."
He is angry that nobody in the hospital acted sooner in relation to Shine's conduct. "What angered me a lot through this was the amount of people in the medical profession and in the hospital who supported Dr Shine through this," he said.
He feels the transcripts of the Medical Council inquiry into Shine's conduct should be made public. He paid tribute to the Medical Council legal team for pursuing the case to the end.
"We owe them such a great debt of gratitude for everything they have done . . . the one thing he didn't want to happen was lose his doctor's status and now the day has come and he has been stripped bare of that, and it's just a wonderful feeling."