Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change) | Oireachtas source

Like Deputies Ó Cuív and Carthy, I wish to again register my frustration. When we put down these questions, we expect the Minister to be here. I wish to put on record that the Minister, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, seems to be operating not only at arm's length from the Dáil, but maybe at bridge length from it at this stage. The Minister of State will deliver a standard reply she got from the Department or whatever. I do not think it is good enough on an issue as important as the new national maternity hospital.

There have been three Private Members' motions proposing that the national maternity hospital should be publicly owned, run and controlled. The motions were accepted by the Government. That is an important point. The Taoiseach has come out and said it should be publicly owned. The decision was made in 2013 to relocate the maternity hospital from Holles Street to co-locate on the Elm Park site at St. Vincent's Hospital. That was the KPMG report, which was accepted by the then Minister for Health, James Reilly. This led to dispute with St. Vincent's Healthcare Group, SVHG, which rejected co-location and demanded full ownership of the new national maternity hospital.

SVHG is a private company owned by the Religious Sisters of Charity. It is a section 38 body fully funded by the State. The Religious Sisters of Charity have now set up a new private company, St. Vincent's Holdings, into which they have said they will transfer their shares in St. Vincent's Healthcare Group, though that has not yet happened, obviously. It has been reported recently that the Minister and the Department have had meaningful negotiations and arrived at some sort of proposition that would be imminently brought to Cabinet. I am seriously concerned about this because it is a fact that not one hospital in the whole world that is run privately by a religious order allows reproductive rights procedures to be carried out.

Professor Shane Higgins, the master of the National Maternity Hospital, featured on a radio programme to discuss the letter he and his colleagues wrote to the Taoiseach and the Minister for Health on 23 February this year. In the letter, they sought to give assurances on the provision of certain procedures at the planned new maternity hospital and to dismiss what they described as misleading and ill-informed commentary from certain Deputies and other people that is derailing the project. I reject and refute that comment. There are significant concerns in respect of the actual procedures that will be provided in this hospital. It is a 299-year lease, which is a massive extension from the 99-year lease to the hospital. It will cost more than €1 billion of public money to build and more than €70 million of public money to run. We want to make sure that every woman and man who needs reproductive procedures in the new national maternity hospital has access to them without being referred elsewhere.

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