Researching Michael Fitzpatrick

He was a member of Kildare County Council for the Clane electoral area from 1999 to 2007. He was a member of the Garda Síochána from 1961 to 1972. He was the constituency manager in Kildare for former Minister for Finance and European Commissioner Charlie McCreevy from 1992 to 2007. He also was a Kildare mayor.

In 2010, he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. In an interview with The Irish Times on 12 March 2010, he said he intended to keep working as a TD.

Fitzpatrick said he had “compared notes” with Brian Lenihan. “We are both on a journey. We talk and chat to one another about our illnesses”. He gave a presentation on his condition to the Irish Motor Neurone Research Foundation.

He lost his seat at the February 2011 general election and died that October. Fianna Fáil cancelled its Wolfe Tone commemoration at Bodenstown, County Kildare as a mark of respect. His funeral was in the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Allenwood, County Kildare.

Fitzpatrick was born at Parramatta and educated at a Roman Catholic school and at the Australian College, where he entered in January 1832, and carried off the highest prizes. After acting as tutor at the Normal Institution, he became a clerk in the Lands Department of New South Wales in October 1837, first-class clerk in 1846, and clerk of the Executive Council in 1851. Mr. Fitzpatrick was selected as the first Under Secretary for Lands and Works in 1856, on the introduction of responsible government. When these departments were divided, he held the office of Under Secretary for Lands until 1869, when he retired on a pension.

Fitzpatrick was member for Yass Plains in the New South Wales Legislative Assembly from 20 December 1869 to 10 December 1881 and Colonial Secretary in the Farnell ministry from 18 December 1877 to 20 December 1878.

He has held a position as a contrarian on certain scientific issues as he has disputed the health risks of secondhand smoke, and promoted AIDS denialism. In The Truth About the AIDS Panic, Michael Fitzpatrick and Don Milligan falsely claimed that there is "no good evidence that Aids is likely to spread rapidly among heterosexuals in the West".

Fitzpatrick's books have also focused on the pseudoscientific treatments for autism, such as Mark Geier's use of chelation therapy and Lupron as autism treatments, which Fitzpatrick has criticized as "dehumanising and dangerous." He also condemned the use of secretin as an autism treatment in his 2004 book MMR and Autism: What Parents Need to Know, in which he wrote that "the secretin bubble burst" when a randomized controlled trial found that it was ineffective. In an interview with The Guardian, he proposed that special diets are appealing to parents of children with autism because so little is known about the cause or possible treatments for autism, "And then someone else comes along and says your doctor's useless, that they know what caused it, and that you can do something about it".

Fitzpatrick has criticized Neurotribes for generalizing about autistic people, noting that most low-functioning autistics need supervised living and experience challenging behavior. He also was skeptical that Naoki Higashida, a non-speaking autistic individual, could have written the book The Reason I Jump because of the "scant explanation" of the process Higashida's mother used for helping him write using the character grid and expressed concern that the book "reinforces more myths than it challenges".