Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I am substituting for Deputy Gino Kenny. I thank all the witnesses for the work they do and for coming along here today.

I have to say that I feel that we are in the middle of something really weird. Drip-fed bits of information keep coming at us, as elected politicians. We are not getting the full truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. For example, the Minister has just told the committee this morning that parts of the new national maternity hospital will be occupied by other elements of St. Vincent’s Healthcare Group that have been displaced. He cannot clarify for us if that will all be public, all private or a mixture of both. I find that really upsetting. We are getting this drip-fed information bit by bit when we have an opportunity to delve down.

Earlier, Mr. Ciarán Devane said that for the last year they have been debating and robustly listening to queries about this project. Yet, we have been in here asking questions for the last year and we have been getting no answers. I do not know how many times most of us in the Opposition stood up in the Dáil to ask for full debates about the future of the national maternity hospital. We are now getting it, after kicking up a fuss and having been told that we are guilty of a campaign of disinformation or misinformation.

The Minister has come in today and is remembering the moment of repeal and the seismic shift that was for the women of this country. Members of the Government engaged in that campaign, whether they were knocking on doors or advocating for it and that was helpful but repeal changed everything. When you look back at the history of the debate, discussion and negotiations around the new national maternity hospital that go back to 2012 and 2013, it seems to me from what the Minister has told us today that the bones and structures were all agreed pre-repeal. How much did post-repeal Ireland change that discourse and discussion? It must have changed it. A lot of that discourse and discussion took place when the sisters or nuns were still on the field. We are told that they are gone from the field and we are repeatedly told that no religious influence will be allowed.

I want to put the following thesis to the Minister. In the same week we got the announcement that the Cabinet was about to sign off on this arrangement the US Supreme Court leak happened. It was leaked that Roe v.Wade was about to be seriously challenged and possibly taken down. For me, as somebody who has fought for repeal and abortion rights all of my life, that was shocking. I understand, as many women in this country do, that for women's healthcare and reproductive rights you make two steps forward and you can take four back. That happens because there will always be a kickback and a backlash against women's rights. That is part of the way our society has been structured. Women's oppression has always involved us making gains and them lashing back against us. Religious interference does not always appear in nuns with long veils traipsing the corridors in the image of Mother Mary Frances Aikenhead. That is not what we mean when we talk about religious interference. We mean a deep-seated and deep-rooted prejudice and an in-built thinking about women's health that goes into the heart of the Civil Service, the health service and the political establishment. It is something that cannot be seen and it does not wear a veil but it traipses around our bodies and lives all of the time and I am seriously worried that this concern will be dismissed. The Minister said six times that it is in the Constitution, that there will be no religious interference and that this cannot be true. That is nonsense and that is not the way it works.

I am delighted that the Minister acknowledged this morning that there is a much more deep-seated sociological reason for the mistrust around this deal and that it is not just headcases like me or others giving out misinformation. There is a deep-seated reason for it. We have to deal with that deep-seated reason and to do so we need much more than we have had until now in terms of reassurances from the Minister that there will be no religious interference. For that we need to know why the St. Vincent's Healthcare Group, which will have deep-seated and deep-rooted ties to the religious orders, will have the right to appoint three board directors and to appoint the chair every few years. Why does it have that right? If this is to be an utterly independent national maternity hospital for the women of Ireland to deliver all reproductive and maternity care then why does it want that interest? It seems to really and passionately want it.

Its fact sheet is extremely interesting and it does not provide the sort of facts the Minister gives us when he repeats that we own it. Mr. O'Donoghue keeps telling us that we "effectively" own it because of these leasehold rights but we do not. St. Vincent's Healthcare Group says that it owns the land and the rights and that it is on the board because of this, that and the other. I am deeply suspicious of its interest in this project. The Minister for Health was involved in devising Sláintecare and I do not understand why we would use all this public money and this opportunity to create a truly one-tier medical system with no discrimination against people based on the depth of their pockets or the size of their wallets with a clearly publicly-owned and funded national maternity hospital in this way. Why do we not take the opportunity to have that? That is clearly not what we have and the plot thickens when the Minster tells me about the private elements that will be in the building and about the clinical independence.

Somebody mentioned Savita Halappanavar. I think of her every day but I did not want to mention her name. However, now that she has been dragged up I want to say that as she was dying, somebody took a decision that it was clinically inappropriate to give her the abortion that she and her husband asked for. Somebody took that decision and even then, pre-repeal, it was legally permissible to do that to save her life. Clinical appropriateness can be decided by somebody who does not agree with my view of the right to choose and of a woman's control of her body. That could still happen with that the phrase "clinically appropriate" mixed up with the term "legally permissible". It is obfuscating in terms of where women stand. What about what they want, rather than what the clinicians want?

We need to delve down into this much more and we need more time and reassurance. If we removed the ownership of the land from the equation, we would get rid of this labyrinthine structure that has been described as Kafkaesque, involving three boards of management with three constitutions and three ways of appointing people and the State would deal directly, once and for all, with the future of women's health. I would like the clinicians and the Minster to address those concerns that I still have, despite this long debate.