Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I join the Chairman in welcoming Mr. McAnenly and Ms Ní Sheaghdha and I thank them very much for attending and representing the INMO. We will have an opportunity to engage with the Minister directly after this meeting. What the witnesses have shared with us will be very helpful in preparing for it. I join Deputy Kelleher in expressing disappointment that NAMA did not feel it appropriate to come before the committee. It is most regrettable. NAMA certainly has questions to answer and we will have to explore them in another way.

The lamentable end result of all of this is we will lose a health care facility. I am not a champion by any means - far from it - of private health care provider entities but nevertheless one must recognise in the situation we are in this was a health facility with 130 beds, 382 staff, expensive medical equipment and extensive premises which are now to all intents and purposes closed down. It is most unwise.

I thank the INMO for ably representing its membership in the nursing and midwifery staff. The staff themselves only learned of what was intended through the media. They have been laid off without proper notice. A number of them have decades of service in Mount Carmel Hospital and other facilities.

I noted the remarks Mr. McAnenly made in his presentation on NAMA. I ask him to elaborate on the role of NAMA in all of this. To my mind, it has looked at this as an asset securing loan acquirement in cold balance sheet terms with no consideration whatsoever of what the facility was about. I wonder where stood its social responsibility, which it most certainly has or is supposed to have, I understand, as part of its terms and responsibilities.

In the closing remarks of his opening submission, Mr. McAnenly indicated that Mount Carmel was not solely a maternity hospital. Nothing makes that point more strongly than the fact that only 25 of the 130 beds were designated for maternity work. The witnesses should provide an outline of the range of other activities that were catered to at Mount Carmel. I note Mr. McAnenly mentioned that approximately 2,300 patients were actually facilitated from the public domain within the facility at Mount Carmel. The patients' procedures and needs were addressed there having been acquired through the HSE's activities and engagement with Mount Carmel on an annual basis. What proportion of patients at Mount Carmel were public patients referred from the public health system? Do the witnesses have such a figure to hand or can they indicate what it might be as a proportion of Mount Carmel's past throughput?

My last question pertains to the important issue of the current prospects for the staff. Members of the Joint Committee on Health and Children are aware that not all 382 employees are members of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, INMO, as they represent a range of service providers, as well as ancillary and support staff. How many of the 382 are nursing staff who are members of the INMO? What are the prospects for this significant number of highly trained and in many cases long-serving health care providers? I already have told the Minister that in the event of Mount Carmel being a shut and done deal, such people, with their experience and expertise, should be re-engaged within a health system that really needs their services. There is evidence aplenty, not merely anecdotal, of the shortage of nursing staff in maternity midwifery. Tragic situations were recently exposed in respect of which nursing and midwifery staff have been crying out since 2006 for additional staff at the Midland Regional Hospital, Portlaoise. While displacement will be part of the experience of these nursing staff, surely within the HSE service overall there must be facilitation to absorb them because the need is there and no one desires for them to be obliged to look to employment opportunities overseas. I will leave it at that and thank the Chairman for the opportunity.