Réada Cronin (Kildare North, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to support the motion proposed by the Social Democrats. It would be a great start for children to be born in a national maternity hospital that is owned and run for the State, by the State and by the rules of the State, without any sleight of corporate hand or torture of language and logic as to ownership and ethos. The St. Vincent's Healthcare Group's statement last night that the group must retain ownership of the site for the delivery of integrated patient care on the Elm Park campus is mysterious. We have had too much mystery, and decades of sorrowful mysteries in the treatment of women's and girls' health and in their reproductive lives. Quite simply, the nuns must gift or sell the site to the State and to us, the people who will be using the hospital, funding it and running it, without any corporate or incorporated detours through holding companies.

The State has a rotten history in how it treats women and girls in pregnancy and in childcare, most of it caused by professional and institutional devotion to the Catholic church where men made the rules, even those who did not wear the trousers. Other men in suits and white coats, with stethoscopes around their necks, did their bidding and oversaw barbaric practices such as symphysiotomy. In ensuring their physical capacity to reproduce, women were reduced to breeding beasts. For those damaged by those shameful practices, there was a veterinarian quality to their treatment, although the veterinarians I know would have been a great deal more compassionate.

In speaking about how women were treated in the past, I wish to speak up for women in the present as well, particularly the women who have written to me, some of whom were 40 weeks pregnant and counting, to tell me that in labour they faced an invasive and unnecessary internal examination, not for a clinical reason but to confirm established labour so their partners could be admitted for the delivery of the child. Again, this bovine treatment is unmistakable. Women are put upon to fit the system as opposed to the system fitting their needs when they are at the limits of their coping and at their most vulnerable. Chosen birth partners are not visitors and they are not an accessory to the process of pregnancy. The Minister said we need a revolution in women's healthcare. Absolutely, and he will not be alone at the barricades in that regard.

Frankly, it is farcical that in 2021 we are tiptoeing around the ownership of our national maternity hospital with a religious order. The gift should not be to a company but to the State, which will pay for and run the hospital for the public good and for women of every faith and none as well as for the good of our children.

From the moment we give birth to our children, the church and State must separate. The Government must be out of its mind allowing a private holding company to have an input into women's healthcare and all that entails. The hospital must be owned and run by the State.

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