Dr. Rhona Mahony:

Absolutely. The legal framework that we are seeing now arises from the heads of agreement that were in the Mulvey agreement. The Mulvey agreement was a partnership, which was an agreement between three parties: the State, St. Vincent's Hospital, and the national maternity hospital. We sat down at the beginning of that to see how we were going to deliver this hospital, and how were we going to make sure that we would have a dedicated maternity facility that is totally protected to do all of its services and also protected in relation to budget and operations. It is not just about termination of pregnancy. It is about the whole service and having our own funding. We did not want to be at the end of the line when we were looking for funding in a general hospital setting. As I said, we had two mediations falling apart because we were going to be a branch. That really was why we had the Mulvey mediation. Very early on in that mediation we realised that ethos was not an issue at all and that religion was not a problem. Actually, as always, the problem was making sure we were not a branch that would be promised ring-fenced funding. Our colleagues in Cork had had a similar experience when joining a big general hospital and they were told funding would be ring-fenced for them. It was not so easy for them. We did not want any ring-fenced funding. We wanted a proper company structure where we had our own service arrangement and where we had control of our building and control of our staff so we could run our hospital and every aspect of it. That really was the key of the Mulvey mediation. As I said, ethos actually was not an issue.

On the share transfer, it is important to make the point that when we were negotiating Mulvey, we knew that the nuns were leaving but we also knew that would be a process. This is also why we made sure that the board of St. Vincent's could have no impact on the operation of the new national maternity Hospital DAC.

To make the point again, St. Vincent's is a totally secular organisation. The current board has achieved that and it is something of which it is very proud. It is proud to leave the church behind and to move forward into its future strategically as a hospital that provides great healthcare to its patients.