Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will make a brief response, if that is possible. I thank the Senator. My view is that it is not acceptable that there are eight HSE hospitals that are not providing those services. I do not believe that is acceptable. It is one of the things that is being looked at in the review of the operation of the Act. However, the direction of travel is very important. With regard to what is happening right now, this year, we will have gone from ten hospitals to 14 hospitals providing termination services. That is very important. This is the second year in which the maternity strategy will have been fully funded. This year and last year, we have been in the process of setting up a national network of new women's health services in gynaecology, menopause, endometriosis and infertility. I hope to secure funding in the budget to make publicly funded IVF available next year and to begin to phase that in. We are introducing free contraception this year, starting with young women from 17 to 25. Women's healthcare, including all of the services we are talking about today, is an absolute priority for this Government. An entire national network of service provision is being built at the moment.

I do not want to say the word "ironic" but one of the things that is interesting about this debate is that, although some may have, I have never heard anyone question Holles Street with regard to termination services. Is it not interesting that two of the members of the board of Holles Street are priests? One of them, the Catholic archbishop of Dublin, is the chair. That role is agreed as part of the articles of association of the hospital, dating from the 1800s. What we are essentially doing is moving the National Maternity Hospital, which everyone accepts is a leader in women's health services, to a state-of-the-art building, to which that hospital is contributing because it is selling its building on Holles Street. We are putting in nine new directors and replacing all of those old structures. Right now, we do not own the land under the Holles Street hospital and we do not own the building. The chair of the board is the archbishop of Dublin. There are elected representatives, councillors, on the board but there are no ministerial appointments to the board. That hospital is not obliged, under its constitution, to provide all of these services. We are moving to a new model and a state-of-the-art hospital co-located with an adult hospital. The new hospital will be legally obliged to provide all services, any religious influence is expressly disallowed and the Minister and State have the power to intervene if necessary. It is interesting to look at where we are and what we are proposing.

What we are doing here is taking any religious involvement out. We are moving from relying on the wonderful clinicians in Holles Street to provide the services to mandating that they must provide them. That is what is happening here. It is very interesting to look at where we are and where we are going; we are moving in exactly the right direction. I do not believe there should be any religious involvement in any healthcare provision in our country and we are actually taking religious involvement out of the national maternity hospital with this move.