Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I want to clarify a comment the Minister made earlier about the letter from the 52 doctors. He said he did not claim that the public comments were misleading and ill-informed. On 25 February, he will recall that he posted on Facebook, quoting extensively from that letter and the comments of the 52 doctors. At the end of his post he said:

I share the view of the doctors that the allegations being made, including by certain Dail TDs, are misleading, ill informed and manifestly false.

They were effectively saying the same things as the doctors and accusing people who were raising concerns of misleading the public. That is clearly completely untrue. We all want to see a new national maternity hospital which is good and fit for purpose to serve future generations. We want that hospital to be modern in the way that it operates, the services it provides, and its ethos. There is no guarantee that this will be independent in ethos. We also want a hospital that is publicly owned. We should not repeat the mistakes of the past, where the State abdicated responsibility for health and education, and funded buildings and land for religious orders. Recently, we have found the difficulties with that and that we could not take it back in any way. Much of that land has been sold for a huge profit.

We want a new hospital, but the requirement is that it would have a secular ethos and be publicly owned. Neither of those requirements is being met, which is a difficulty. This issue has been live since 2016, both for the current Minister and the previous Minister, Deputy Simon Harris. Neither has been able to square that circle. For the past seven years, we regularly asked what was happening with the maternity hospital, and we were told that agreement would be reached imminently, in the coming weeks or very shortly. It has not been possible to square that circle, as the Minister knows, because under the present proposals, the hospital will not be publicly owned and it will not be secular. That is not acceptable to the public. There are a number of aspects to this, including the site on which it will be built, the building itself, and, most important, the company which will build the new national maternity hospital, DAC.

The points made by Deputy Alan Farrell are completely untrue. The proposed corporate governance structure that we have been told will apply is one where the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street will cease to exist with its present identity. It will become a wholly owned subsidiary of St. Vincent's Holdings CLG. It will lose all of its independence and current ethos. The Minister made a disingenuous statement that all necessary services for women's healthcare are provided in Holles Street. They are, because Holles Street is not a religious hospital. It does not have the involvement of any religious order. That status will change under these proposals.

This started seven or eight years ago, when we were talking about co-location, which makes sense from a health perspective. We are no longer talking about co-location, but about a takeover. This is a full takeover of our National Maternity Hospital by St. Vincent's. That is utterly unacceptable. It is unacceptable for any hospital to be handed into private hands, whether religious or otherwise. It is particularly obnoxious that the Minister would consider doing that with a maternity hospital. Has he learned nothing from this country's recent history? Irish women simply do not accept the proposition that we would have a maternity hospital that would be controlled by a religious body which is a successor to the Religious Sisters of Charity. I can understand why the Minister is not looking up. He must be embarrassed at the prospect of doing this, in light of things that he has said over the years. Why are we handing over a €1 billion asset to a private entity, with full control being given to a successor organisation, St. Vincent's Holdings CLG, which was established by the Religious Sisters of Charity?

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