Local Faces: Dr Patrick Troy

DR PATRICK Troy grew up on a farm in the Strawberry Beds, within striking distance of the communities of Ballyfermot and Cherry Orchard, where he worked over several decades as a doctor in the local drug treatment service, the Aisling Clinic.

Patrick, 66, has happy memories of growing up in the Strawberry Beds as the second eldest of eight children, in a family that put an emphasis on education.

“The Strawberry Beds was very rural when I was growing up, so we all went to a one-teacher primary school and there were about 13 or 14 students in the school,” he recalled.

The Troy children were raised in a family that prioritised education, as their father had earned three university degrees in the 1930s and he wanted his children to enjoy the benefits of education.

When Patrick’s primary school education concluded, he went on to secondary education at Sandymount High School and St Kieran’s College, a boarding school in Kilkenny.

It was when he was in his mid-teens that Patrick realised he harboured ambitions to become a doctor, though he ended up taking a slightly meandering route to achieve his goal.

Dr Patrick Troy

“At the age of around 15 or 16, I decided I wanted to be a doctor,” he said. “It took a while to achieve that goal.

“I’d applied for medicine in Trinity College, and it was before the CAO system. I got 14 points, but you needed 15 points to get into medicine.

“I had missed out on medicine so I asked them what else they had. They said engineering, so I did an engineering degree in Trinity.

“After I graduated, I started working as an engineer, but I still had a hankering to do medicine.”

In 1980, when he was in his mid-20s, Patrick was accepted into the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland to study medicine.

Patrick balanced his studies alongside working as an engineering and mathematics lecturer in DIT Kevin Street, and his interest in pursuing a career in medicine was cemented during his time in RCSI.

“I was fairly narrow-minded and focused on being a doctor, and I knew that once I started it, I’d finish it,” Patrick said.

“I found studying medicine very interesting and varied, and I knew I was getting my second turn at being in university.

“Medicine was easier than engineering. Engineering can be very abstract, but medicine is memorising and analysing.”

Dr Patrick Troy qualified as an engineer before realising his true ambition to become a doctor

In 1986, Patrick qualified as a doctor and worked in the Jervis Street and Beaumont hospitals as a casualty officer and went on to work in Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry during the Troubles.

“We all had to live in mobile homes in the hospital grounds in Derry,” he recalled. “At the time, I was treating people with injuries from things like shootings and bombs.

“To me, as a young doctor, it felt a bit like ‘MASH’. They were wheeled in then you appeared in your white coat, and you worked on them and you saved them and the whole lot.

“I was still living in Dublin but I’d go through the army checkpoints every Monday morning. One morning I was stopped by them and they found all these needles in my car.

“I told them I was a doctor in a hospital in Derry. They said, ‘Do you look after our boys?’ and I said, ‘I look after everyone, it makes no difference to me’, and they let me through.”

In total, Patrick spent three years working in Altnagelvin. He went on to work as a doctor in Australia, where he treated patients with HIV, and spent some time in the UK as a GP.

In the mid-1990s, Patrick returned to Dublin and began working in the National Drug Treatment Centre, Trinity Court on Pearse Street, marking the beginning of his decades-long career treating patients with addiction issues.

“At that stage there was an epidemic of drugs in Dublin, and it wasn’t possible to get work as a GP in Ireland because there was an embargo on hiring GPs,” he said.

Dr Patrick Troy

“So I worked in Trinity Court for two years, and when I left I started working in addiction clinics in the community and around the city.”

At that time, Patrick was working in 22 clinics around the country treating people with addiction and also HIV, owing to his experience treating people with HIV during his time in Australia.

Patrick found that he enjoyed working as a doctor in addiction services, particularly the Aisling Clinic in Cherry Orchard, where he ­had been based since the mid-1990s up to his retirement last June.

“I found that this aspect of medicine suited me,” the father-of-five said. “It’s very straightforward and you can be direct.

“When I came to the Aisling Clinic, I was quite amazed by the people. We had a great team working there, and there was a real genuineness among the people in Ballyfermot.

“These people were great people, and I have to admit I enjoyed working with them.

“Though we got a lot of abuse, and I had bullets handed to me, people trying to burn my car and intimidation from drug dealers – it was just part and parcel of it.”

He added: “There’s no cure for addiction, but you do your very best to keep them going.

“Some people will stabilise. They get back to their families and into employment and see their children again.

“That benefits the whole community. So our successes in the Aisling Clinic were more community based than individually based.”

Patrick praised the resilience of the Ballyfermot community and the people he worked with over the years, and sounded content when he reflected on spending the majority of his medical career in addiction services.

“I just got this idea that I wanted to be a doctor,” he said. “I had no medical background, but I just got in and that was that.

“I wanted to do surgery but, looking back, I’m glad I didn’t. I feel like my life was made richer by the ultimate work I did.”