Dr Gerry Waters is a man who has led many lives.

On Tuesday (26 November, 2024) Gerry Waters expressed his high opinion of himself on a post on X. He criticised the media coverage of the candidacy of Gerry Hutch in contrast to his own fringe candidacy, referring to himself in third-person as “the only doctor to be illegally suspended from the medical register as a conscientious objector in Irish history.”

Indeed, Dr Waters’ claim to fame – at least in 2024 – is that he was struck off the medical register for his opposition to vaccines and mandates during the time of Covid-19. He was opposed to the vaccine and joined the ranks of a collective of eccentrics from the medical world who have been traversing the country for several years on a crusade against “WEF/WHO globalists ideology”. Other notables include Professor Dolores Cahill, Dr Vincent Carroll, Dr Anne McCloskey and some others.

As such, Dr Waters has received some plaudits on the conspiratorial right-wing where he’s regarded as a bit of a martyr. He started appearing on the social media ecosystem of the conspiratorial right like the Irish Inquiry. He’s also a regular guest with John Waters (no relation) on livestreams where the two bemoan the state of the country in the face of a kingsized globalist conspiracy to institute globalist communist tyranny.

Gerry Waters, now in his mid-70s, ran in the European elections in June 2024 as an independent, doing poorly. Now he’s running in Kildare North for the Irish Freedom Party, which describes itself as a “pro-life” and “pro-natalist” party.

But Gerry Waters is not just a mild-mannered Kildare doctor who trudged along through life without courting controversy or attention until Covid-19 arrived on the doorstep of his doctor’s surgery. Dr Waters is a man who has led several lives and has repeatedly kicked against the pricks.

But despite all his Cassandra-like warnings about WEF/WHO tyranny which lines up perfectly with a conspiratorial right-wing worldview, Gerry Waters brought himself to some notoriety as an ardent opponent of Catholic Ireland. He came to prominence as a major advocate of abortion, IVF, and as an extreme anti-Catholic.

Trendy doctor, advocate of contraceptives and IVF

Gerry Waters is from Drimnagh. He trained to become a doctor in Galway (UCG) while living in a caravan and a mobile home.

He set up practice in Kildare where he was an acolyte of Dr Andrew Rynne, who is widely acknowledged as the foremost Irish liberal proponent of birth control. Dr Rynne was chairman of the Irish Family Planning Association (IFPA), the foremost abortion advocacy group in Ireland during the 1970s and ‘80s.

As a follower of Dr Rynne, who ran the private Clane General Hospital, Dr Waters set up his own Whitethorn Clinic in nearby Celbridge as Ireland’s first specialist clinic for female sterilisation in 1984 at a cost of £140,000. He isn’t an expert in female sterilisation, or even a gynaecologist. He’s just a local GP who “saw a gap in the market” and an opportunity to make some money.

At the time, Irish hospitals would not perform such procedures due to religious/ethical objections and a general consensus across the medical profession. Like abortion, most women who sought such an operation did so in England.

Described as a “luxury clinic”, Whitethorn charged women £250 for the sterilisation operation, which used the laparoscopic tubal ligation technique. The procedure was performed by an English-based doctor who came over from London. (C. Hug, The Politics of Sexual Morality in Modern Ireland, 135). This price tag was quite considerable for the time and it was not covered by health insurers like VHI. Dr Waters told the Evening Herald in September 1984: “Yes, I do expect to make a profit.”

The Catholic position on female sterilisation is unambiguous: it is morally wrong to sterilise a woman deliberately as a form of contraception. Indirect sterilisation (caused for example by sickness or some other operation) is an entirely different matter.

Clearly, in 1984, Dr Waters was firing arrows at the orthodoxy of Catholic Ireland. As such, he was celebrated as a pioneering hero of Liberal Ireland.

Dr Waters cultivated a public image as a trendy liberal doctor, unafraid to tread on the toes of censorious conservatives or the clergy. Sporting a pony tail and riding a Harley Davidson motorbike, he regularly courted the media limelight. Aged 45, he said: “I don’t want to ever fully grow up and become what could be termed a conservative.” In June 1995 he lost a court case which he took against a motorcycle dealer, alleging that the bike’s condition was misrepresented to him. The bike dealer took a counterclaim of £2,150 against Waters, and the judge found in favour of the motorbike dealer.

In addition to his sterilisation of women, Dr Waters also screened women (some of whom were unmarried) for IVF fertility treatments in England which were then banned in Ireland, including the use of donor eggs which were then fertilised by the husband or partner and implanted in the woman.

As is well known, IVF involves the mass destruction of embryonic life, which is the main reason the Church opposes it. Moreover, it is considered an assault on the natural mode of reproduction by the Church, and can include the impregnation of women in their 50s and 60s. But Gerry Waters, in 1994, said he had “no ethical qualms” about any of this and said “it is wrong of us to make judgements for other people.”

When Dr Waters was denounced by a local priest for his operating a “family planning clinic” which performed operations that were at variance with Catholic social teaching and for encouraging women to obtain IVF and abortions in England, he hit back that Fr Simon O’Byrne was “not fit to speak” and that the Church’s view on marriage “will change in a couple of years”.

Eccentric abortion advocate during the dying days of Catholic Ireland

In the 1990s, particularly following the X-Case, Dr Waters became more vocal on the abortion issue.

In frequent letters to newspapers he railed against Catholics and actively promoted abortion.

In 1993, he wrote that the Church had no right to speak on moral issues because of “its burning of witches and horrendous torture and murder of heretics” (Irish Independent, October 26, 1993).

The same year, he accused a pro-life woman and “her ilk” of taking the moral high ground on the abortion debate. He vocally opposed a motion by the Irish Medical Organisation to reject abortion, by saying that their opinion has no relevance “to the 12-15 women a day who travel to England for abortions” and described the pro-life resolution of the IMO as a “sad delusion” and “naïve”. He expressed that he “feels nauseated… when I see a tiny group of [pro-life] doctors whose emotional, non-scientific catch-cries have been comprehensively beaten off the pages of the medical press, turn to the general press with their crowding triumphalism”. (Sunday Independent, 23 May 1993).

In 1994, he wrote of the “necessity for safe, legal abortion”. (Irish Independent, 28 September 1994). He argued that the fertilised embryo is “not an individual human being” and denied that the human heart begins to beat at 25 days after conception.

He wrote that “abortion is and always has been a reality in every society” and bemoaned “the absence of the easy accessibility of English abortion clinics”.

In May 1995 he took a swipe at “anti-choice doctors” by writing “I have often felt that the local hairdresser or breadman may well be more capable of giving humane, pragmatic and compassionate advice than some of my colleagues, who allow theological arguments to override medical, scientific and sociological facts.” (Irish Independent, 31 May, 1995).

Ironically, given his current railing against the WHO, he freely quoted WHO statistics on a declining abortion rate in countries with legal abortion. He further tried to bat away alleged “alarmism” from “anti-choice” doctors over the Cairo Conference on population, sponsored by the United Nations. (Irish Independent, September 1994).

He continued to defend abortion in the pages of newspapers, including claiming that “abortion does not cause the death of a child, it involves the prevention of an embryo or foetus fulfilling its potential to become a child – a biological fact known to all doctors.” He also waxed lyrical about abortion in ancient history: “since the dawn of recorded history women in crisis pregnancies have chosen termination as a solution to their dilemma” and denied that performing abortions was in contradiction to the Hippocratic Oath. (Irish Independent, 14 June 1994).

He sometimes strayed outside his prosaic pro-abortion arguments by also promoting an anti-Catholic agenda. He railed against the encyclical of John Paul II Veritatis Splendor , describing it and its defenders as being filled with “cliches, catch-cries, and pub talk”. Discussing the Catholic Church, he expressed his view that “the world does not need direction from old men endeavouring to preserve their sphere of influence in a world that has passed them by”. (Irish Independent, 12 October 1993).

Illustrating his massive ego (which is still visible in his social media posts today), Waters decided that being profiled as the trendy biker abortionist doctor was not sufficient limelight. He now made a foray into politics as an independent candidate for the Seanad in the 1993 election, standing on the NUI Panel. He polled 596 votes (1.71%) and was not elected. He was one of the few open supporters of abortion at that time.

During his election campaign, he was criticised by the IMO – which had adopted a pro-life position, which he denounced as “imposing self-righteous, ill-informed and simplistic notions which have no medical basis.” (Irish Independent, May 9, 1993). He was also denounced by the Council for Social Concern for comments he made that Ireland wasn’t “facing up to its responsibilities” and should move to legalise abortion. The rest of the world was progressing, he argued, “while we continue to export our ill-informed women with their 12 and 14 week old foetuses for abortion”. He claimed 5000 women have abortions each year in England, “No constitutional amendment or draconian law has succeeded in stemming the flow”. (Irish Examiner, 5 January 1993).

In 2000, Dr Gerry Waters – by now in his 50s – told the newspapers how he sees up to 12 teenage girls per month looking for the morning after pill, with 2-3 falling within the 16-18 age group. The youngest girl he spoke of giving the morning after pill (abortifacient) to was just 14 years old. (Irish Examiner, 12 May 2000).

Quackery and politics

When Covid-19 arrived in 2020, Gerry Waters still practicing as a GP in his Whitethorn Clinic. His prominence as an abortion advocate was behind him and he was overshadowed by much more prominent figures like Dr Mark Murphy or Dr Peter Boylan.

In the 2016 book The Politics of Sexual Morality in Ireland, Dr Gerry Waters was still profiled sympathetically as a pro-abortion doctor with a “flamboyant personality”, “particularly in his altercations with the pro-life movement.”

As is well known, Gerry Waters was suspended for his conduct during Covid-19. As reported, he had pamphlets in the waiting room of his surgery with the title “No Pandemic Killing Us” and told a patient the State and the Government were “scamming the people” and called it a hoax.

A complainant in court stated: “Dr Waters even suggested my illness was as a result of 'that silly fucking thing’ I was wearing, as he pointed to my mask. His behaviour was beyond inappropriate”. He claimed that death toll figures were inflated and that “propaganda” perpetuated by governments and the media in relation to Covid-19 was being used to “front run” an economic collapse in the Western world. (Sunday World, 1 April 2021).

The rest of the arc of his ‘career’ as an activist on this issue is well known and does not especially interest me. He is currently a candidate for the “pro-life” Irish Freedom Party for the election being held on 29 November 2024.

In a video with the Irish Inquiry before the European elections 2024, Waters stated he would always support a woman in her decision to have the abortion and that “it was the best she could do”.

In 2019, the year abortion became legal, and while Dr Waters was still practicing as a GP, there were 295 abortions performed on women from County Kildare. (Annual Report 2019, Notifications in accordance with S. 20 of the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018). In addition, he screened and acted as an abortion referral agent in Ireland during the 1990s, which was permitted under the Regulation of Information (Services Outside the State For Termination of Pregnancies) Act 1995.

In conclusion, Dr Gerry Waters is a quack who’s been struck off the medical register but now has found a new lease of life in his mid-70s. He has a very long and detailed history as someone who engaged in vituperative pro-abortion advocacy, even at a time when this was not so common. Now he’s strangely floating around right-wing conspiratorial circles and is a candidate of a right-wing, pro-life political party, the Irish Freedom Party. I’ve seen no reason to believe he’s actually changed his core views on these socio-moral issues, which he argued, to his credit, in a well-researched and credible manner.

A consistent theme with Gerry Waters is that he’s always craved attention and media limelight. He’s always had a big ego and relished his image as a trendy eccentric type, fighting against “power” (then it was Catholics, now it’s… the WHO/WEF/Globalists?)