Mr. John Pollock:

One of the concerns of the members of the committee is the capacity of the site for maternity services. I will ask Dr. Sharon Sheehan in a minute to talk about the relocation of the Coombe, but one thing that demonstrates how we handle maternity services is that as part of our planning application to An Bord Pleanála, we did not lodge a planning application for maternity services. That was not what we were asked to do by the Government. That decision was only made in May of 2015, and we lodged our planning application in August of 2015. However, what we did do is produce a master plan for the campus. The people who know this campus best of all are now us. We were told we would not deliver a children's hospital in this campus and that it was too cramped and too small. We delivered a planning application and An Bord Pleanála adjudicated on it and made no changes to it. We understand this site. We understand how we need to stay within the Dublin City Council development guidelines regarding height and access to the sites. We understand all the planning issues about overlooking and protecting residents. We applied the same strategy as we applied for the children's hospital to do an outline design of the maternity hospital. We have identified the site. It is three acres. Much of it is made up of a car park, which is the outpatients department of St. James's Hospital. The other portion is a single-storey building, the outpatients department, which would need to be demolished. That building was erected in the 1970s. That three-acre site will be a full maternity hospital, and we have physically plotted all the connections, whether underground, for servicing it and for materials, or corridor links above ground for moving patients and staff from the maternity hospital to the children's hospital. I am therefore extremely confident that we will deliver a maternity hospital on the site. What our site capacity plan demonstrated is the 50 acres of land we have on St. James's Hospital site, and because of the fact that heights will go up as permitted under the Dublin City Council development plan, our building will be seven stories. There will be more seven-storey buildings in St. James's Hospital. Our outline master plan demonstrated that we can have the St. James's adult campus and the children's and the maternity hospitals, and on top of that we could build another children's hospital, so we could triple the development on the 50 acres at St. James's Hospital. That is while protecting the listed building and the residents. This campus of 50 acres can therefore triple in capacity, so we will comfortably deliver the maternity hospital. Would Dr. Sharon Sheehan like to talk about why it is so important from her perspective?