Dr. Rhona Mahony:

I thank everyone for giving us an opportunity to come and tell our stories and to outline why this hospital is so important. I agree with the Minister. Ireland has been through a lot. When we look back at the history of women's health in particular and the interplay between church and State, it has been very difficult for women. It has had a profound impact on women's health and lives. We are now moving forward into a different Ireland. We have seen huge advances in the past ten years. The campaign for the repeal of the eighth amendment was a real moment for me. I remember attending a meeting of a health committee, just like this one, in 2013 when I was pretty much a lone voice. I was not as lonely as all the women who had gone to Europe to fight their cases on their own. By 2018, we had all come together and we had a movement and could talk about and express what happened to women. That was a pivotal point in our history in terms of moving forward in women's health.

With this project, we are moving forward again. We are saying goodbye to the church completely. There is no religious ethos pertaining in St. Vincent's hospital. There is a complete separation. We are moving forward and leaving that behind. However, we are moving forward in a different way. The vision for this hospital is a vision of enormous possibility for what we can give to women in this country. It is not just about the old facilities in Holles Street where women are crowded into tiny wards and long 14-bed wards, where we do not have an intensive care unit, ICU, or high-dependency unit, HDU, where babies are crammed into units in which their parents cannot be with them and where there are no toilets and a lack of showers. We have heard a great deal about this. The new facility is going to be magnificent. We will have a facility where the tiniest citizens in the State, babies as small as 23 weeks and weighing 500 g, will be in a magnificent, dedicated pre-term birth centre and their parents can stay with them and be involved in their care. A neonatal intensive care unit is a really scary place. We know this has much better outcomes for babies. We will have proper labour rooms. We will give expression to the maternity strategy in terms of having all that choice for women, with midwifery-led birthing units, birthing pools and beautiful rooms. Women will have dignified, single-room accommodation across the whole building. We will have proper operating theatres. The key here is that those operating theatres will link into St. Vincent's hospital, the very place we need them to link into, and also into the hospitals ICU and HDU, which Holles Street does not have at the moment.

It is much more than that, however. I think the piece we have missed is what is on the campus of St. Vincent's hospital. Women have been hearing a lot and have been worried that the services available to them will be restricted. It is quite the opposite. We will be hugely increasing services. The St. Vincent's hospital campus deals with 150,000 inpatient and day-patient cases every year. There are 50 clinical specialties, more than 200 consultants and 5,000 staff delivering a whole gamut of healthcare services which will be available for women. The hospital already cares for 500 women with breast cancer every year who are treated there.