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

I thank the Minister of State for her reply. First of all, the Religious Sisters of Charity have physically gone from SVHG but their canon law has not. They have got permission from the Vatican and the Irish Catholic Bishops Conference to go ahead with this deal. Under canon law, St. Vincent's Hospital is the property of the Catholic Church. I did not hear anything in the Minister of State’s response to say it will not continue to use canon law while it gets the national maternity hospital. That is my very significant concern and that of many Deputies and many people outside of this Chamber. It must be made very clear that canon law has absolutely no input into this national maternity hospital.

I looked at the ownership structure. There will be St. Vincent's Holdings. Under that there will be the SVHG, and under that there will be St. Vincent's public, St. Vincent's Holdings private, St. Michael's and the national maternity hospital. The St. Vincent's Holdings board, the SVHG board, the SVHG group CEO, the group clinical director, the clinical directors and all of the practices and consultants, etc., will be under that clinical governance structure. It is quite clear that the clinical governance here is the canon law governance of Mary Aikenhead, under which the hospital is run. The Minister should be more open to meeting Members of the Dáil to let us know what is going on. In this deal, seemingly they just agreed with what they could do under law, but did not extend it to future legislation that could be brought in. It is too dodgy.

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