TAOISEACH MICHEÁL MARTIN has said that a former UHL surgeon should never have been operating on Jessica Sheedy, who died in 2018 of complications following a routine procedure.

The issue was raised during Leaders’ Questions, after Dr Ashish Lal yesterday admitted to professional misconduct.

Jessica Sheedy (18) from Bruff was admitted to University Hospital Limerick on 8 May, 2018, to have a benign tumour removed from her abdomen. 

During the procedure she sustained a “significant bleed”, losing a total of seven litres of blood. 

Jessica died three days later on 11 May, in the hospital’s High Dependency Unit, from “multi-organ failure secondary to the removal of the tumour”, a post-mortem concluded. 

The Medical Council found that three allegations of professional misconduct and ten of poor professional performance, made against her surgeon, Dr Lal, have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

Dr Lal had made full admissions in relation to these allegations.

Speaking in the Dáil during Leaders’ Questions, Limerick TD Richard O’Donoghue, who knows Jessica’s family, thanked the present management at UHL for their cooperation with the investigation, but lamented the length of time it took for the fitness-to-practice inquiry to conclude.

“By covering it up for eight years, how many other people have been seriously injured or have died under that same management?

“This took eight years and only for Anne Louise, her mother, Jimmy (her father), and all her friends keeping at this and having medical backgrounds themselves, this would be buried for a lot longer,” he said.

“And only for the current management in UHL, this would have been buried.”

He said there should be a probe into how the hospital’s old management hampered the investigation.

“There has to be accountability of the people that were overseeing that hospital at that time,” he said.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin said it was “absolutely unacceptable” that parents should lose their daughter “in such circumstances”.

He said Dr Lal “should never have been doing the operation”.

“I can’t comprehend how that happened.”

He said the removal of the benign tumour “should have been a straightforward procedure” and that the now proven clinical failings raise other questions.

“I don’t want to prejudice what may follow here, but this has to be examined in the most comprehensive way,” he added, responding to O’Donoghue’s calls for further investigations.