Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

On a related matter, a couple of months ago when news first broke about Government proposals to hand over governance and ownership of the new national maternity hospital to St. Vincent's Healthcare Group group, the public reacted with outrage and disbelief. That reaction centred on two points. The first was the inappropriateness of a religious group having any role in the governance of a public maternity hospital and the second was the profligate manner in which the Government viewed it is acceptable to gift a valuable asset — a State asset — to private interests.

We have not heard the Government, including the Minister, on this week's developments but we have heard from St. Vincent's Healthcare Group. It stated that, despite the departure of the Sisters of Charity, the terms of the Mulvey report would still apply. St. Vincent's Healthcare Group is a private corporate body. It has no right to dictate the Government's public policy. A public hospital funded by the public for public patients should, of course, remain in public ownership.

There is, however, a wider context for public disquiet over giving away a €300 million asset to this private body. The corporate entity known as St. Vincent's Healthcare Group has been under audit by the HSE for some time. Concerns relate to the entanglement of St. Vincent's University Hospital and St. Michael's Hospital, both public hospitals, on the one hand, and St. Vincent's Private Hospital, on the other, and to the suspected cross-subsidisation from public to private. The director general of the HSE told the Committee of Public Accounts in April 2015 that the private hospital was "being run on the back of the public hospital". He described it as having a "parasitic dependence on the public hospital", to such an extent that it may well not be viable as a public hospital in its own right. Many questions remain. The HSE still has not been informed about the detail of the charge created on St. Michael's Hospital by St. Vincent's Private Hospital in favour of Bank of Ireland. What about the financial arrangements within the group and the top-ups and salary scales in operation? A review of suspected breaches of contract in the context of consultants' work is to begin shortly.

St. Vincent's Healthcare Group epitomises many of the structural problems within the Irish health care system. The need to disentangle this dysfunction was a key recommendation of the Committee on the Future of Healthcare. Does the Tánaiste not accept that it would be highly imprudent to contemplate exacerbating the anomalous corporate governance arrangement within St. Vincent's Healthcare Group by adding yet another public hospital to its portfolio of assets?

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