My wife, Rachel Downey, was a health and social affairs journalist who went on to become a communications strategist at the Department of Health. There she worked at the heart of health policy, translating complex and often sensitive issues into communications that the public could understand. It was demanding, important work and she was exceptionally good at it.
Most recently Rachel, who has died of renal failure aged 60, was head of public relations at the Office of the Patient Safety Commissioner. It was a role that felt, in many ways, made for her, as the Office exists to amplify the voices of patients who have been harmed, to hold systems to account and to drive change where it is most needed.
At the Office Rachel led public communications around Martha’s Rule – the landmark initiative giving patients and families the right to request an urgent review if they believe their condition is deteriorating and their concerns are not being heard – and was equally central to publicising the Hughes Report on financial redress for those harmed by the prescription drug sodium valproate and by pelvic mesh implants.
More recently she led communications for the Safety Gap Report— an examination by the commissioner into the disparity in patient safety outcomes experienced by different groups, allied to a call to close the gap between what patients are promised and what they receive.
Rachel was born in Dublin to the political journalist James Downey, of the Irish Times and later the Irish Independent, and his wife, Moira (nee Stevenson), a secretary. During school holidays from St Laurence college in Loughlinstown, County Dublin, Rachel got her first taste of journalism during work experience at Southside, a Dublin paper, and found that she loved the excitement of a deadline.
After studying English at University College Dublin she completed a journalism course at Dublin City University and moved to London in 1987.
Starting out as a reporter on the now defunct London Irish News, she immersed herself in the Irish community in London, covering big political stories such as the campaigns for the release of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four.
In 1990 she moved into social affairs journalism as a reporter on Social Work Today magazine and later as news editor at Community Care (1994-99), where she became executive editor (1999-2002). She was then appointed editor of Nursing Times (2002-2008), where she understood instinctively what nurses needed from their trade press: not flattery, but honest, intelligent and independent journalism that reflected the reality of their working lives.
Rachel moved out of journalism in 2009 and worked at the DOH until September 2025, when she became seriously ill, having lived with type 1 diabetes all her adult life.
She had a special relationship with her father, who died in 2016, and honoured his legacy by posthumously publishing his book, The Legacy of Gombeen Ireland (2020), a lament about the failures of successive Irish governments after independence.
Rachel and I met through mutual friends and were married in 1999. She is survived by me, our sons, James and Colm, and her sister, Vanessa.
