Mairead Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Twelve years ago, the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General identified some of the key risks posed by this deal. A chapter of its report was called “Protecting the State's property interest” and identified several alarming details These included the existence of "a fixed charge over the entire St Vincent's Hospital site" and "a floating charge over all of the undertaking, property and assets of SVHG both present and future". The Comptroller and Auditor General’s worrying conclusion was that the St. Vincent's Healthcare Group had "pledged publicly-funded assets in return for bank finance for the development of its private hospital". In other words, the land on which we are going to build this hospital has been used as collateral for other transactions. It was used as collateral to raise debt and for the development of St. Vincent's private hospital and commercial car park. As a result Bank of Ireland now holds a charge on this land. Therefore, not only is the Government proposing to build our new national maternity hospital on land that we do not even own but the group which owns the land has a charge on it held by Bank of Ireland, which is a potential risk to the State.

The Day report of 2018 recommended that when the State is paying for a hospital, it should own it outright. That is the best outcome and way to safeguard state investment, option agreements notwithstanding. Two members of the HSE board also expressed concern about governance if the State does not own it outright.

Thomas Hubert reported in The Currencythat St. Vincent's Healthcare Group was granted a temporary reprieve from non-compliance with its debt covenant but this was pandemic relief and it is about to come to an end. This deal is so bad that I cannot believe it has got to this stage. I am outraged that it has got to this point and that we have had to raise it continuously. So many women and activists have done for so long. It is fraught with risks and uncertainties. It is unnecessarily complex and disregards established policy designed to protect State investment. It is a bad deal for women and for the taxpayer. It creates risks for women's health and the taxpayer. Finally, for parties which consider themselves to be so pro-business, they are terrible at doing business themselves.

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