Dr. Peter Boylan:

Research is part and parcel of a third level, high-class hospital like Holles Street and what goes on in the hospital. There is a huge amount of research going on at the moment. Again, we do not know about the future. There are gene therapies coming down the road. There is a technique called clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, CRISPR, which will probably require IVF and the treatment of embryos prior to implantation into the mother. The church, apparently, has not taken a particular position on this so we are not sure what the ethical guidelines and codes around that will be, so there are risks associated with the structure at the moment.

Subcommittees will be formed and one of the subcommittees is an ethics committee. That has the potential to cause problems when you look at the board structure because it is a subcommittee of the board so there will be board members on that committee. Again, we are at risk with the current structure that, if there are conservatives on that ethics committee from the board, that could create serious problems. Under the current structure, therefore, there are so many risks associated with this it is very hard to see how there will not be conflict, rows and reversions to the courts, perhaps, and back to the Minister, and who knows who the Minister will be. We have seen the problems in the US with Roe v.Wade being rolled back. Women's reproductive rights are under threat, under attack and there is pushback all over the world. This structure creates a risk in that respect.