Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Sisters of Charity have been again implicated in really quite shameful practices, in terms of the revelations about illegal adoptions and their involvement in St. Patrick's Guild. The order has also been implicated in the mother and baby home scandal but, incredibly, this same religious order will be running the National Maternity Hospital, against a background where Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said last May that under no circumstances, regardless of the outcome of the transfer to the St. Vincent's Holdings group, which is controlled by the Sisters of Charity, was there a place for abortions in hospitals run by the Catholic Church. This is extraordinary stuff. There are visually impaired and disabled residents near the campus of St. Vincent's Hospital in St. Mary's Telford, who themselves went through mother and baby homes and who are now being evicted by the Sisters of Charity. Elderly women who are blind are being evicted by the Sisters of Charity. This is a publicly funded critical part of the national health service but run by a religious order that is unaccountable to anybody and has behaved in these ways. Does the Taoiseach raise these issues? Is it not way past time that our hospitals and the assets these religious orders own are taken back into public ownership?

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