Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

There are quite a few things happening with regard to patronage and ownership. Many new schools are being built around the country. Many are community national schools, Educate Together schools or are under education and training boards, ETBs. Some are under relatively new religious patronage bodies such as Le Chéile or Edmund Rice Schools Trust. These new builds on new sites are publicly owned by the Department of Education and Skills. There is a divestment programme, which is slow but it is happening. That relates to a number of locations around the country where the parents of pre-school children are being surveyed and polled about what type of patronage they would like to have for their local school. In time, that will lead to quite a number of diocesan national schools being transferred to the patronage of the local ETB.

In healthcare, a former chief civil servant in the European Commission, Catherine Day, has prepared a report on patronage and voluntarism in our health service. I do not think many people in this House will dispute, with regard to voluntarism in the health service, that many hospitals around the country, including the Mater, St. Vincent's or the National Children's Hospital, formerly on Harcourt Street, or the Mercy in Cork, were founded by religious bodies or charities, often being paid for, built and staffed by them and they did the country a lot of service. We should not throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.

We need to modernise, but I do not believe that should involve abandoning or expelling voluntarism from our health services. The same would apply to Our Lady's Hospice and to St. Francis' Hospice as well. It is a case of making sure we have modern structures and governance in place, but that does not necessarily mean complete and absolute secularisation.

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