Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

What happened at Portlaoise hospital was absolutely wrong and I agree that it was not all down to resources. I listened with absolute horror one morning on my way to the Houses to a mother on KFM radio station who described a heartless incident where her dead baby was brought to her in a tin box with a cloth over it. She had queried during her pregnancy if everything was all right, but when her baby was born it had catastrophic deformities. Those assurances made it much more difficult to come to terms with the baby's death. The families involved need to know the truth and must be facilitated to know it and we must stop codding ourselves about maternity services. Dr. Rhona Mahony has said that in the past decade Holles Street Hospital had seen a sharp increase in activity without the corresponding increase in staff. I just use it as an example. Writing in the hospital's clinical report for 2013, she highlighted severe shortages of consultants and midwives at the hospital. She said the UK had three to four times the number of consultants in obstetrics compared to Ireland and went on to say the hospital was overexposed in terms of the volume and complexity of cases. She said doctors and midwives found themselves in an extremely challenging environment. She pointed out that complications could be unpredictable and severe.

We already know through an article written by Nicola Anderson that Irish women spend on average just two days in hospital after giving birth, which is approximately half the time most other European women spend in a maternity unit. More and more, their experience resembles a conveyor belt. As women in Ireland on average give birth later, we are far more likely to see complications. I talked recently to an obstetrician who told me how terrified they all are of litigation. They have that spectre hanging over them, which influences every decision they make. We must pay attention to what is happening now. It is getting to a point where we could see a repeat of this. It will be a resources issue then.

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