Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The key motivating factors behind the decision to co-locate the National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street, with St. Vincent’s were safety, optimal healthcare and outcomes for women and babies plus the deteriorating conditions in the existing physical facility of Holles Street. Those were the key motivating factors in the decision, eventually announced in 2013 after ongoing discussions between the two voluntary hospitals, to co-locate the new national maternity hospital on the St. Vincent's site.

The expert medical view and all international research says that maternity should not be stand-alone. It is a feature of the improvements in our health service that we locate a maternity hospital adjacent to and integrated with a major national tertiary facility so that if women become ill, have certain conditions and so on, the expertise is on-site to intervene quickly to save lives. The fundamental motivating public interest in this is to save lies and have better outcomes in circumstances where risks are present. That does not happen across the vast majority of maternity care but the informed advice and recommendations to successive governments has been to co-locate maternity and neonatals in tertiary hospital settings. That will apply to Limerick, is in Galway and will have to apply to the Coombe and the Rotunda hospitals as well.

The difficulty here was that this location was on a private hospital group owned by a religious order. That issue has dragged on since 2013. First, there was a dispute between the two hospitals as they endeavoured to reach an agreement. Kieran Mulvey mediated between them and produced a report in 2016. In 2018, planning permission for a new hospital was secured. Enabling works were completed thereafter, in terms of a pharmacy and car park. That is where we are now.

A CPO is easily called for but, coming back to the original objective, if we move off-site, what tertiary hospital do we suggest it should go to? If we CPO, is everybody in the House prepared to say we will wait another number of years as conditions deteriorate? These obvious questions arise in the event of a CPO. We know how long CPOs go on.

That said, the three fundamental points I mentioned that have to be addressed relate to ownership, governance and, without question, the fact that there can be no religious involvement, good, bad or indifferent, in the running of the hospital or in what is allowed there.

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