Ms Mary Brosnan:

Like many others, I have been involved in the project for nine years. I am the director of midwifery for the last 15 years in the National Maternity Hospital. I am passionately interested in this project as are so many stakeholders.

The Deputy asked particularly about why dermatology is in the building. There are very detailed maps available for everybody to scrutinise this. Much of St. Vincent's campus will be disrupted to build this very large structure. It is around 50,000 m2 of which 35,000 m2 to 40,000 m2 will be the national maternity hospital's business. There is another part of that campus that will be shared services, particularly all the catering and all the sterile services department. They will all be shared and quite a lot of other facilities.

The other element is that St. Vincent's current campus will lose a lot of its space. Procurement, ward areas such as dermatology and transitional care beds all had to be planned into the new service. There is a very large, long, L-shaped building in the plans. At the moment it is configured as a red block in the diagrammatic schematic picture. If you drill down, there is an L shape which is built into five or six different elements, that is, our own big build - hopefully- the shared services and what St. Vincent's needs to build to replace what we are taking over. It is very complicated because it is a working hospital. It is the largest campus hospital in south Dublin and Leinster, almost. A huge amount of work will be required to be done in the middle of a working campus. It is complicated. We phased it. There was originally discussion of doing it in two phases and now it will hopefully be built in one. We are very comfortable that the language that was put into the document protects maternity, women's health and neo-natal services for the future.