Doctor Patricia Comer, the well known local GP, pictured left, was asked to retire by the H.S.E. when she reached her seventieth year. When I met her recently she told me that she had just received the good news that they had extended her contract for a further year.

She expressed her thanks to all those people who wrote letters and lobbied the local politicians on her behalf.

I met Dr Comer at her surgery in Haddington Road. As we sat looking out onto the trees of the sunny back garden, she recalled how she had come to Dublin, as a shy young girl of 18, from her native Charleville in Co Cork to study for medicine in UCD.

The class ratio of 10 women to 110 men was extremely challenging. She smilingly adds “I married one of them.” They had great fun but also worked hard to pass exams after which she had jobs in hospitals for three years and then joined her husband in the practice in Haddington Road.

She comments that the claim by one of the newspapers that she was one of the first female GPs is, she feels incorrect, as two of her aunts who graduated from Dublin College of Surgeons had gone on to work as GPs in London.

I asked how it was for a woman GP in her early days “Not great,” she remarked, “it was mainly female patients for me and at first they only wanted to see Cyril. He had a great personality and was very outgoing.”

Gradually however, things changed and now she has a good quota of male patients as well. Also, she feels that patients are more educated now and do not hesitate to question things.

In answer to my query about hobbies, she shook her head, saying “there was no time.” Cyril died aged 38, leaving her the sole breadwinner to rear three young children. However, with a twinkle in her eye, she adds that she did like a gamble in her younger days but after one particular marathon poker session her losses were so serious that she says “I stopped from the fright and never gambled again.”

Her daughter who has three children lives in Dublin. One son lives in Ringsend and the other in the USA. She not only works from Haddington Road but also lives there.

She remarks that she sometimes thinks she might like to live by the sea but feels that her work is of too much importance in her life for her to move.

Dr Comer expresses her bewilderment at the policy to obligatorily retire doctors who wish to remain working for the H.S.E. as it would appear that they have a scarcity of GPs.

Furthermore, she points out that contrary to the busy life of many younger people, she herself is free enough at this stage of her life to choose to be more available for patients, often up to the later hour of 10pm and to do call-outs, as many of her patients are in their latter years.

Even though she is free to continue her private practice, Dr Comer’s eventual compulsory retirement by the H.S.E. will result in the withdrawal of her services from her medical card patients, many of whom have been attending her for up to 40 years.

She hopes that a way will be found to alter this H.S.E. ruling that indiscriminately obliges their medical card GPs to retire at 70 years of age.