Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Developments over recent days have just compounded our concerns about the proposed new national maternity hospital. Our concerns persist. They are valid and legitimate concerns that remain around the ownership, control and governance of the proposed hospital. The core question for the Labour Party remains that of ownership. It is freehold ownership. We are talking about ownership in perpetuity. That is the difference between public ownership in perpetuity and the leasehold arrangement, a "complicated" arrangement, as Mr. Fergus Finlay describes it, that is currently on the table.

The core point for us in the Labour Party is that we want to see a publicly-owned hospital built on publicly-owned land. That does not mean land that is held on a 300-, 200- or 100-year leasehold where St. Vincent's Healthcare Group is the landlord and the HSE the tenant. It does not mean land that is privately owned by a successor company to a religious organisation.

It is publicly-owned land that we seek. At this stage, in 2022-----

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