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

It might be said that she played the long game, and sometimes that is the most successful strategy to adopt. I am also very pleased as a Trinity graduate to welcome her to the House and sorry to lose her from the Seanad's Trinity constituency. I am sure there will be an interesting contest for that by-election. I believe it has already begun.

As for the wider issues, as Minister for Health, one of the things I am very proud and privileged to have been able to do was to make sure that Ireland for the first time had a national maternity strategy to ensure we had the highest standards of care for pregnant women and neonates. That strategy is being implemented and funded. I am glad to see that is the case and I am determined to keep a watching eye over that as Tánaiste. We also have new guidelines on partners visiting maternity hospitals. It is the view of the Government and the HSE that partners should be able to attend a labour ward or ICU if their newborn is there and should be able to attend for important scans, such as anomaly scans. I understand that is not the case in a small number of maternity units for local reasons and I am disappointed that that is the case, but we need to allow local infection control managers and clinicians to make local decisions in certain circumstances.

As to what is happening with the national maternity hospital project, an engagement is, as I understand it, under way or at least about to be under way involving all the partners involved, that is, the HSE, the Department of Health, St. Vincent's and the National Maternity Hospital itself. What we seek to achieve is the co-location of the new national maternity hospital on the campus of St. Vincent's. This is the best option for women and children. I have no doubt about that. I know people talk about alternative sites. There is not a better alternative site that provides co-location with an adult hospital with the facilities and standards St. Vincent's has. Going down that route, I think, would case a delay, and nobody can say how long that delay would be. It is therefore the right decision to co-locate the hospital with St. Vincent's, and I am determined we should go ahead with that. The Government has red lines and these have moved on since the Mulvey report. We are insisting that we own the hospital, that we own the building. We are insisting that there is a cast-iron legal guarantee that any service that is legal in this State should be provided in the hospital, whether gender reassignment surgery, terminations or assisted human reproduction. These are absolute red lines. I think we have achieved that. There is still issues around the governance, representation by the State, by the people on the board and the lease. It is by far our preference that we own the land, but it is a little like Lesotho being surrounded by South Africa. It is not as straightforward as people may think. The site is a piece of land surrounded more or less on all sides by St. Vincent's Hospital and its campus. We need to make sure that any arrangement we have around any lease is one that we are satisfied with and that is long enough.

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