Scientist retires after helping fight against Covid-19

Scientist retires after helping fight against Covid-19

30 June 2021

FROM the laboratory to the smallest of God’s creatures, Dr Conall McCaughey’s interest in how things work is inexhaustible.

Hailed by Northern Ireland’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr Michael McBride, as “humble, unassuming and disarmingly brilliant”, the Annacloy man is already enjoying his retirement.

The medical world’s loss has been nature’s gain.

His hens, four hives of honey bees and a relatively new wildlife pond — created specially to encourage damsel flies — are equally enjoying the extra attentions of the man who is fully embracing his lifelong love for nature.

Combined with his passion for macrophotography — photography producing photographs of small items larger than life size — a love of fishing, and of music, as a Ramones fan, Conall ensures that he is always busy and occupied.

Until nine weeks ago, he worked as the lead consultant virologist at Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital. He hasn’t fully left just yet as he’s still doing one shift a week as a locum until next April. 

He was one of a team of quiet and unassuming scientists who quickly had to develop a test to diagnose Covid-19 at the start of the pandemic last February.

As the former clinical lead for Microbiology at the Regional Virus Laboratory of the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust, Conall’s team went from doing just eight tests per day in February to assessing 2,300 tests in a day ten months later.

The scaling up of the testing was challenging, not just scientifically, but practically.

“There were days that the test didn’t work and times when we were not getting results out as fast as wards wanted,” explained Conall. 

“In the spring of last year, we were running out of things, simple plastics, various reagents or components of tests. 

“We had to change the test and had to borrow things. Sometimes at the end of the week, you were doing something very different you never would have envisaged at the beginning of the week.”

Conall, was awarded an OBE for his work in Covid-19 testing, in recognition of running the third Covid-19 testing laboratory to be up and running in the UK.

It was long and arduous work for all concerned but what has left a lasting impression with Conall was the teamwork and ‘can do’ attitude from his staff and every other department in involved.

“The thing that surprised me was just how positive and enthusiastic everyone was. I remember the first conversations in January with the Department of Health and the Chief Medical Officer, and the Public Health Agency,” he recalled.

“Everybody was saying, ‘What do you need, what can we do for you’.  In the public sector, you think of everything going slow, it’s difficult to make things happen but it was completely the opposite with this.

“At the start, we were all that there was. The testing by the other health trusts was still to come. It’s not like when something new comes along, you can just go to a manufacturer to buy it. You are the manufacturer. You have to get to work and then you need to make sure it continues to work.

“Yet there is no doubt that there are silver linings to this and we will be better at the next pandemic, which will come. The belief that we can do things is so much stronger than there was before.

“It has left a good legacy in that new technology and systems which as been put into laboratories will be used every winter.”

He described how there was a pooling together of equipment, human and other resources across the board — from using equipment from the NI Blood Transfusion Centre, manned by Tissue Typing Laboratory 

staff, staff from the regional fertility centre and regional genetics laboratory all working alongside Conall’s team. 

From last autumn, even the scientists at the veterinary laboratory, the Afri Food Bioscience Institute (AFBI), were doing over 400 tests per day, greatly helping in the Covid surges from last October and earlier this year. 

“If somebody had said to me last March that the veterinary lab will be doing human samples testing and reporting on them to our lab system, I would have said that’s impossible,” shared Conall.

Conall said he accepted an OBE last October for his work during the pandemic as much in recognition for the work of his team than for himself.

Virology is a specialism that is dear to his heart, having spent nearly 30 years working in the same department at the RVH.

After a few years as a doctor on hospital wards, he took a virology training post in 1991 and never looked back.

His career has been exemplary and a feather in the cap for a lad from Carryduff who failed his 11-plus exam.

Conall never had a chip on his shoulder about it, because as there was no expectations ever placed on him.

“I don’t know of anybody, including myself, realistically expected me to pass the 11-plus,” he said. “I was the eldest of 11 so it wasn’t as if I had an older sibling to follow. I was content to go to De La Salle Secondary School in Downpatrick, as it was known then, and I got into the G stream where some people could get pushed up into St Patrick’s Grammar School and that’s what happened after third year.

“It wasn’t that I was a good all-rounder, but I was good at maths and science.”

For the 59 year-old father of three, his interest in science and nature goes hand in hand.

“I think my interest in science was always there. I’m fascinated about how things come together, how they come apart and how they are interrelated to one another. 

“It was about me getting home from school to get out and go across the fields to a place in Carryduff where we called the swamp where I would be out with a bucket and a net catching sticklebacks.

“Ive always been interested in fishing and nature, they were the things I loved as a kid,” he continued.

“My mother Veronica always said, and still says, that my hobby was looking under stones. 

“I think fishing is sampling an ecosystem that you can’t see. It feels very similar to me getting out of a car to look under a stone or to look in a  beehive. 

“When you are looking in, you try and and see what’s going on in terms of health and behaviour and likelihood to swarm

“It’s only in recent years that I realise that everything I get a buzz out of, conforms to that idea of looking under a stone.”

He and wife Paula and three daughters have called Tullynacree Road in Annacloy home since 2003. 

While four of his brothers and sisters live either in the US or England, the rest are all close to the Downpatrick area.

The family especially has an affinity to the Saul and Ballyhornan having holidayed there every July as children. 

He said: “I knew all the fields at the back of Saul, even the names they were given and saw so much wildlife then, even lizards, though nobody would believe me. But they are native to Ireland.”

Honeybees and an interest in bring back to native Irish black bee is important to Conall now, rather than testing for disease.

He is currently cataloguing his extensive range of pictures of bees for the Irish Honeybee Society and is a recent member of the Belfast Beekeeping Association.