Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The first two questions are around this ask from the Labour Party and others who say they want a State-owned building on State-owned land. I understand fully why people want that. The point I was making previously was that this does not provide the guarantee that people may be demanding because when you look at the remaining maternity hospitals or wards that do not provide them, you can see that they are all State-owned hospitals on State-owned land. By definition, that model does not guarantee what people want. In fact, it is the voluntary hospitals that have led the way on this. Regarding the Senator's very reasonable question about why the HSE hospitals are not providing these services, this year, we will have moved from ten to 14 so we are moving quickly in the right direction. Partly this is because we are directing funding. I have ring fenced funding for termination services so several hospitals have the money and investment. We are investing at a level never seen before in maternity services, gynaecology, menopause and endometriosis - a wide variety of areas. All of this money coming into our services is one of the things helping these hospitals to do it.

The question was about why we cannot get HSE hospitals to provide services. I respectfully answer that we are doing so. We are moving from ten to 14 and I intend to move further. We are all interested in the review of the Act, which we will debate here. That is another mechanism that we all want to use to identify the final blockages and to get rid of them.

On the matter of having a State-owned building on State-owned land, we will build the building and it will be ours. We hold the operating licence, appoint three directors and the Minister can intervene at any time to ensure that all services are being provided and that there is no religious influence in the hospital. The State has strong involvement in this new national maternity hospital that we do not have at all in the current National Maternity Hospital, yet it is a leading hospital. We, as Members of the Oireachtas, have to decide on the land issue. I would prefer for us to own the land. The Minister, Deputy Harris, and I asked for that. The position of St. Vincent's from the first day is that this has never been negotiable. The original agreement was for a 99-year lease, which has moved to 299 years. The conditions are essentially that we run a healthcare service on it, for €10 a year, which is basically free.

There is a question about whether we could try harder to get St. Vincent's to give us the land. It would say that it is doing so, for the next 300 years. We cannot get freehold of the land. Others have very reasonably asked if there could be a compulsory purchase order for the land. I asked that of the Department. The answer is that we could try, but I received legal advice that there would be no guarantee of success, because we would have to prove that it has to be built there and nowhere else in Dublin and that 300 years is not enough for us to have lease ownership for a building with a useful life cycle of 50 or 60 years.

Secondly, this is a partnership. It would not surprise me if an involved party said we approached it, asked for a partnership and that it gave us the land for 300 years, and that if we are now going to bring it to court, it is not interested in a partnership since that does not feel like a partnership. It comes down to whether we are willing to move to another site. Those advocating for it present it as a viable alternative. Unfortunately, we cannot own the land, but could we build somewhere else?