Dr Pat O’Neill retired earlier this year after a medical career which lasted more than 50 years, spanning the worlds of academia and practice. To the general public, he may be best known for football, but his professional life has been varied and wide ranging.
What does that mean? Well, his retirement involved stepping down from his consultancy in orthopaedic and sports medicine at the Mater Private, the sports and exercise injury clinic that he headed at the National Orthopaedic Hospital in Cappagh, and more than 30 years lecturing in Trinity College on orthopaedic anatomy.
Then, there was co-authorship of the textbook Sports Injuries, which sets out to define clearly the practical implications of findings identified by MRIs and ultrasounds in patients with sports injuries.
And that’s before we factor in football.
RM Block
A significant presence on the ground-breaking Dublin team of the 1970s, he also managed the county to an All-Ireland and served the GAA through the decades, lending his expertise to a range of committees.
This is the 50th anniversary of his first All-Ireland final, coming on as replacement in the decider which announced Mick O’Dwyer’s Kerry, and the 30th anniversary of managing the 1995 All-Ireland winners.
If old enough, you may remember him as a wing back, maybe all too literally taking a break from the caring profession. He remains unfazed by all the Decade of the Dubs lore: “Break them on Sunday, fix them up on Monday”. Did it get annoying?
“No, a bit of banter really. It might have been because I wasn’t wasting my time on either side of the equation!”
Nor was he. Medicine was kind of in his family. His mother, Nance, was a nurse and a couple of her siblings were doctors. Billy O’Neill, his father, was an agricultural scientist with “more of an interest in the animal side of it than in the soil”.
His dad was also a Kilkenny man with a primary love of hurling, and the young Pat hurled minor with Dublin as well as playing football.
There were actual football genes from Kilkenny as well. Grandfather Paddy played on one of the last Kilkenny club teams – Slatequarry Miners – to reach the Leinster final.
Kevin Heffernan, who would become a mentor and a confidant, managed the Dublin minors in 1968. They won Leinster but lost an All-Ireland semi-final to Cork. O’Neill was sent off for hitting John Coleman.
He doesn’t dispute the accusation, which arose from a previous altercation, but the referee was unsighted and was alerted by his umpire despite a motion to that year’s congress having defeated such advisory powers.
Heffernan never mentioned this incident in all of their time collaborating. Until years later when he allowed himself a measure of recrimination: “Of course, you probably cost us a minor All-Ireland that time”.
His arrival on Heffo’s senior team was delayed by a randomly escalating illness, which went from his kidneys to the lungs and ended up with him on life support for a couple of days. It was early 1974 and, in football terms, a terrible time for such a debilitating setback.
Both his club, UCD, and county won senior All-Irelands in his absence. That must have been hugely disappointing? “It was. I was thinking I might have missed the bus.”
He was able to make up for both, as UCD retained the title a year later and Dublin won back-to-back All-Irelands in 1976-77.
O’Neill was born in Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe then was) but moved home at a very young age and has no memories of life in Africa. Educated at Gormanston College, where he came under the influence of Down All-Ireland winner Joe Lennon, who was head of sport, he chose to pursue medicine in UCD, having considered pharmacy and architecture.
In those days, you simply walked into Earlsfort Terrace and chose your subject once you had a basic Leaving Cert. The thinning of the medicine intake happened in pre-Med.
“There was up to 400 in the UCD medical class anyway at the start, and then for the second year that was reduced down to 120, on the basis of the pre-Med exams.”
Having survived and graduated, he found himself under pressure between the long hours of being a non-consultant hospital doctor and the demands of football. The weekend of the 1976 league final turned out to be a particular problem.
“The Friday was not meant to be a busy night, but it turned out to be very busy. Training in that era was on Saturday mornings, so I turned up, trained and went home where I fell asleep for the afternoon. That disrupts your whole sleep pattern and the next day, I was in bother against Derry. Mickey Lynch was the man I was on and he ran riot.”
Lynch kicked 0-6 from play and O’Neill was called ashore well before the end. It persuaded him of his next move, which was to park his hospital training and go back to college.
“I went back to UCD and was lecturing in anatomy there for a year, but you also were able to pursue further study, so I did a postgraduate degree in anatomy as well.”
His academic direction led to the then developing field of sports medicine. So did practice, as intercounty players were frequent visitors to see him in his days as registrar in Dr Steevens Hospital. “It was handy,” he says. “They got the train to Heuston and it was just across the road.”
Following the recommendation of a colleague, he applied for a position in Saudi Arabia through Parc, the Aer Lingus-owned specialist recruitment agency. When that appointment finished and growing interested in the evolving field of sports medicine, he returned home to pursue a postgraduate degree in London.
“Sports medicine, essentially, is a broad church, so it involves a lot of the other specialities involved in medicine. My particular focus, because of what I was doing, was orthopaedics and trauma emergency medicine. It was very geared towards injury-related stuff.”
He was offered a position back in Saudi, as clinical director of a new sports hospital, which he accepted. “It was a very modern and highly equipped building. It was largely an international staff that was involved, so it was interesting and got me involved in administration as well.”
As a member of the Saudi medical team, O’Neill went to the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.
Heffernan was an occasional visitor to Saudi because of the ESB projects there and he arranged for O’Neill to look after an employee who had been badly injured in an accident.
Talking to David Walsh for the great 1989 Magill retrospective on Dublin in the 1970s, Heffernan recalled the episode.
“The Americans out there saw what he did with the young fella and then wanted O’Neill doing different operations on their people. As a footballer, I remember his marvellous hands and his absolute fearlessness.”
Although offered a place in an American hospital, O’Neill decided to stay put when back in Ireland and pursued a career in the developing sports medicine field.
Looking back, he identifies joint replacement surgery as a major development in improving people’s quality of life. Sports medicine is more accurately known as ‘sports and exercise medicine’ because it encompasses many more recreational participants than elite performers.
“It has been one of the biggest advances in medicine the last number of years,” he says. “It doesn’t get the same kudos say, as heart transplantations, but that has been one of the huge advances in medicine internationally.”
On the field, 1976 stands out as his first All-Ireland with Dublin but also 1973 when he and his brother, Joe – who died this September – played championship together for the county. Another brother, Bill, who died in 2013, played a major role in the development of the Straffan club in Kildare.
O’Neill looks back at the 1995 team he took to Dublin’s only All-Ireland in the 28 years between 1983 and 2011 and remembers how he, Jim Brogan, Fran Ryder and Bobby Doyle were all team-mates in the 1970s. He also notes that the 1995 team has produced a batch of mentors, including the last three Dublin All-Ireland-winning managers: Dessie Farrell, Jim Gavin and Pat Gilroy.
“There was satisfaction in that. I mean, that was the aim, to get Dublin football back into the frame.”
Not wasting his time on either side of the equation.
