Professor Chris Fitzpatrick:

-----and from Northern Ireland. They have their babies in the Coombe and then they are stabilised and transferred to Crumlin. We are the closest hospital to Crumlin and we will be the closest hospital to the paediatric hospital in St. James's, and we are saying that distance is too long for those very fragile, critically ill babies. There are other non-cardiac conditions - babies can have lung disorders etc. - that have the same requirement. Those babies identified before delivery would come onto the site of a maternity hospital on that campus, be pre-identified, the mothers would have their babies there and then would be wheeled across a corridor to access all the services. This is the model of care the members of the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board, when one meets them, including the medical director, are espousing. They say that that is what they want. Their brief is to build the children's hospital. They will say, "Our brief is not to build a maternity hospital." The members have seen what happened in respect of this project. There was a children's group, a National Paediatric Hospital Development Board, HSE estates, the Department of Health, and many other people looking at this development and things falling in between them. What we want is a person to take a decision to say this hospital goes onto this site. It is a priority. There are other hospitals that need to be moved. There is the Rotunda and Limerick hospitals and there are elective hospitals to be built, but the paediatric hospital is the number one development and it will not deliver the goods and it will not save babies from these dangerous ambulance journeys. In terms of the record, the transfers have been very good but babies do not arrive in the shape they should in circumstances like that. I do not know what the Committee of Public Accounts can do in respect of that, but in terms of money alone, we could have built a hospital on the wrong site because we cannot put in a maternity hospital.