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

My time is up so I want to make a couple of remarks before I finish. Fair play to Ms Brosnan for having such confidence that she can guarantee the future of women's healthcare in terms of abortion in this country. Nobody in the United States can guarantee it for women in America and they have had it long, long before we have had it.

While I have a minute, I want to thank Professor Deirdre Madden and Dr. Sarah McLoughlin for their statement this morning. They have been hugely courageous in providing that statement to us. It should be published and everyone should read it. In the closing paragraph they express their concerns on governance and control. It noted that: "Although the agreed clause in relation to services will facilitate the provision of all legally permissible services at the new NMH boards also influence the culture, values, and ethics of the entity they govern, and this gives rise to the legitimate concerns for us about the potential influence of ethos".

I return to how we have three sets of appointees on a board of management instead of a Minister for Health - who I do not fully trust at the moment because of everything I have heard that contradicts what I am reading; even if I trusted the Minister for Health - being able to appoint the directors of the boards or some entity that does not have the vested interest of the St. Vincent's Hospital group and others. I do not trust it and I think that is shared by many others in the country. We have a statement from these two eminent people who dissented from the decision on 13 March to go ahead with this deal on 14 March. I think people need to take note of that statement. The idea that ethos can influence medicine is always there. We need much more to guarantee that just because the nuns have gone off the pitch, the influence of the St. Vincent's Healthcare Group will have much more weight than it ought to. I want to thank the two women for taking the courageous step of making that statement.

I am publicly asking the Minister to hold off on making the decision until we delve down much further into what is going on. I have heard Dr. Mahony repeatedly talk about how bad things are in Holles Street. I understand that. I disagree with some commentators who have said it is like a slaughter house. It is not like a slaughter house. I have friends who gave birth there in the last year and they got on very well. We need to calm down a bit. We need to step back and really delve down into what we are doing here. We need to give it more time. If we have given it eight or 12 years, it can take another bit more time to get it right. We took a long time with the national children's hospital. That is costing us a load of money but at least it is being built on a campus where they own the land and are sharing the state-of-the-art facilities and medical facilities with St. James's without all this nonsense of three boards of directors and three constitutions and three mixed-up ways of dealing with things. Why could we not do the same as with the national children's hospital and St. James's with this? It is because St. Vincent's Healthcare Group do not want it. It wants a huge influence on this hospital.