This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Lawrence William White. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 30 July 1928, United Kingdom
Died: 7 July 1994
Country most active: Ireland, United Kingdom, Nigeria
Also known as: Patricia Bailey
Sheehan, Patricia (née Bailey) (1928–94), medical doctor, speech therapist, and campaigner against nuclear power, was born 30 July 1928 in Southampton, Hampshire, England, the younger of two sisters. Her father was a marine engineer on the White Star Line, frequently away from home for long periods on sea voyages; her mother, formerly a teacher, was Irish-born. Patricia’s early education was at La Sainte Union School, Southampton. At the outbreak of the second world war she was on holiday with her mother and sister visiting family in Ireland. Fearing the potential dangers of returning to a major port of a warring nation, her mother enrolled the girls in her own former school, Loreto in Balbriggan, Co. Dublin, where Patricia completed her secondary education (1939–45). Her father, a crew member on the Queen Mary bound for New York when the war commenced, did not join the family in Ireland until 1944. Studying medicine at UCD, Patricia qualified as MD, B.Ch., and BAO in 1952. While interning in England at Southampton General Hospital, she became interested in speech disorders through working as medical attaché at the hospital’s newly opened speech therapy department. She married (c.1953) Robert Sheehan, an Irish solicitor, whom she had met at UCD, and returned with him to Ireland, settling in Clonskeagh, Co. Dublin, where she lived for the rest of her life.
Unable to secure employment with public health authorities owing to the ban on married women, Sheehan volunteered as a speech therapist in the cerebral palsy clinic of Professor Robert Collis in Bull Alley St., Dublin, working there into the mid 1960s. One of her first pupils was the writer and artist Christy Brown; Sheehan asserted that the experience of encountering a person of such intelligence and wit burdened with severe difficulties in communication determined her resolve to assist people with speech disorders. In later years, as services developed, she practised speech therapy in many locations in the Dublin area, with such agencies as St Michael’s House and the Central Remedial Clinic, where one of her pupils was the writer Christopher Nolan (1965–2000). During the civil war in Nigeria (1967–70) she worked with disabled refugees, and ran a bush hospital in Indubia, East Central State. The sudden death of her husband (1965) interested her in issues regarding bereavement; the paucity of such services being highlighted after the 1974 Dublin bombings, she became involved in bereavement counselling. Having suffered and survived cancer earlier in life, she also counselled cancer patients.
In 1974 Sheehan, in conjunction with a fellow Dublin doctor and former school friend, Irene Hillery, commenced research into the probable cause of an unusually high cluster of children with Down’s syndrome born to former pupils of a convent school in Dundalk, Co. Louth. After discounting their initial working hypothesis attributing the phenomenon to a 1957 influenza epidemic in the school, Sheehan and Hillery published a report in the British Medical Journal (1983) suggesting a possible link with radioactive material accidentally discharged during a reactor fire at the Windscale nuclear reprocessing plant, Cumbria, England, in October 1957. Coinciding with a Yorkshire TV documentary linking a high incidence of leukaemia in the vicinity of the plant to radioactive discharges, the Sheehan–Hillery report was the first to link discharges from the Windscale plant (later renamed Sellafield) to health problems in Ireland, and was frequently cited by Irish activists and politicians campaigning for the plant’s closure.
Seeking to improve her knowledge of relevant sciences in the pursuit of further research, Sheehan obtained a master’s degree in applied science at UCD (1986), for a thesis measuring levels of radioactivity in seaweeds on the Irish coast. In 1994 she published a new study, based on an expanded sample population, linking a range of birth defects and childhood deaths in Ireland to radioactivity from the Sellafield plant. Studies by other doctors have similarly suggested links between Sellafield and high incidences of leukaemia, other cancers, stillbirths, and birth defects in counties Louth and Down. However, a study by a team of scientists published in 2000 disputed the findings of the initial Sheehan–Hillery report (G. Dean et al, ‘Investigation of a cluster of children with Down syndrome . . . ’, Occupational and Environmental Medicine, lvii, no. 12 (2000)). The validity of Sheehan’s research thus remains contentious, and is queried even by some who advocate the closing of the Sellafield plant on other health and safety grounds.
She died 7 July 1994 in a car accident at Farnagh, Moate, Co. Westmeath.