Fingal O'Reilly, Irish Doctor by Patrick Taylor Read Free Book Online Page B

that case, will you explain to me why you were so hard on that young woman?”
    “By Jasus, O’Reilly, ye are a terrier. All right.” He leant forward, elbows on the desktop. “Poor stupid girl. It’s not her fault. They leave school at ten, because as any kid in the tenements will tell ye, learning still doesn’t get ye a decent job. Some lasses are lucky, end up as one of the ‘Jacob’s Mice,’ the girls taken on by the Jacob’s biscuit factory when they turn fourteen. A whole lot of kids start courtin’ in the stairwells of the tenements, often get put up the spout or just get married too early. Half of them don’t even know where babies come from, and when they end up as mothers it’s usually their own grannies who teach them motherhood skills, because their mas are out at work.”
    “I’ve seen it,” Fingal said, “but what can we do?”
    Doctor Corrigan shook his head. “Pick up the wreckage, use whatever treatments we have. Some of them are useful. Try to comfort, and try to prevent what we can.” He pursed his lips. “Mary Foster’s not going to be persuaded by the Socratic method of reasoned argument.”
    That brought a smile to Fingal’s lips.
    “That’s twice she’s nearly gassed the wee mite. The only way I could think of to try to stop her doing it again was to throw the fear of God into her. I can’t give her what she needs, a husband with a decent job, family support—her granny died of TB last year, her own ma sells used clothes in the Iveagh Market on Francis Street. She’s the eldest of nine. She lives in a single end on Peter Street with her husband ‘Boxty’ Foster, he’s one of eleven and he’s in and out of builder’s labourers jobs.” He blew out his cheeks. “Do I need to go on?”
    Fingal shook his head. “I hear you. My own ma’s working hard for slum clearance, decent rehousing, but it’s not going to happen overnight.”
    “No, it’s not. Nothing changes fast in this benighted city, and us dispensary doctors keep carrying on pretty much the same as when the first Act of the English Parliament set the dispensaries up in 1851.” He shifted on his stool. “That was after An Gorta Mór, the great hunger, as part of the poorhouse system. But things are changing now.”
    “Before we went to the accident, you’d mentioned a 1933 Act of Parliament,” Fingal said, glad the subject of their conversation was being changed. “It was a Pott’s fracture, by the way. John-Joe Finnegan’s off to Sir Patrick Dun’s to have it set.”
    “They’ll do a good job there.” Doctor Corrigan nodded to himself. “They’ll have him doing toe exercises in ten days, but he’ll not be walking on crutches for at least a couple of months.”
    And after that? No job waiting for him as a cooper, that was for sure, Fingal thought.
    Doctor Corrigan grunted and shook his head. “Aye, the 1933 Act of Parliament. Bah. Ye might as well know that I’ve no time for politics. It’s best ye understand that about me, for my sins, right now. Bunch of bollixes, the whole tribe of them, Sinn Féin, de Valera’s Fianna Fáil , this new Fine Gael lot, the Labour Party James Connolly founded? Well, maybe I’d give Labour houseroom, but only just. I’d not give ye tuppence for the rest. Never know when to leave well enough alone. A plague on all their houses.”
    Fingal wondered if his senior colleague might have a fondness for the works of Shakespeare.
    “They’ve decided to amalgamate all the eighty old independent Approved Medical Insurance Societies that administered the dispensaries and paid our wages under one governing body, the Unified Health Insurance Society, for the whole twenty-six counties of the Irish Free State. The chairman is the Very Reverend John Dignan, Bishop of Clonfert.”
    “Trust the Catholic Church to have its finger in the pie,” Fingal said. The church forbade contraception; the government made it illegal in 1935. Was it any wonder Mary and Boxty Foster had