Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I appeal to the Taoiseach to stop; to stop that side of the House from trying to make us look like we do not give a damn about the maternity and reproductive care of women, that somehow we are delaying it through misinformation, that we are Opposition for the sake of opposition and that we are playing politics with this. Please stop. This is not helping the debate for the ordinary people out there who are interested and who want to know what the hell is going on. Poll after poll has shown that the vast majority of ordinary people do not trust this arrangement. Many are still undecided about whether they trust the Government but the majority does not trust it on this. The women of Ireland do not trust you.

On Saturday outside this House there will be a major protest about this deal with the call that the Taoiseach, the Cabinet, the entire Government and the whole Oireachtas should be screaming at St. Vincent's Holdings and St. Vincent's Healthcare Group to give us the land. They are after all a body that was involved in redress for what happened to the women of this country. There is a legacy and a history and there is a bad taste in our mouths.

The Taoiseach should not tell us we are playing politics with 100 years of attacks against women and their health. If he thinks there is no reason we should not trust him, he should look around him at his Cabinet and his Ministers who voted and campaigned against the repeal referendum, who tried to hold back progress for women. I will remind everybody that the new National Maternity Hospital is not just about delivering babies and good maternity care. It is all about that but it is all about the entire gambit of reproductive rights including abortion and sterilisation.

We have constantly been given guarantees that that would be written into the arrangements of three different boards with three different constitutions, with a plethora of complex intricacies to create a board of management that the Taoiseach is telling us will be guaranteed to deliver and that we do not need to own the land. However, then he says we practically do own the land. If we practically do own it, the best thing for the entire Cabinet to do is to call on St. Vincent's Holdings to gift the land to the people of Ireland and remove the complex, labyrinthine arrangements around the future of maternity and reproductive care for women and girls in this country. We are owed at least that after 100 years of absolutely outrageous persecution of the female sex in this country. We are owed at least the guaranteeing of the future. It will not be guaranteed under these documents. I will get into why in my retort, but I am asking the Taoiseach to please stop accusing us of playing politics and take this debate seriously.

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