Mark Ward (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I want to start off by talking about the legacy of mistrust in respect of religious orders having any connection with women's healthcare. I want to talk about the historical abuse suffered by women at the hands of religious orders. I also want to talk about the connection between church and State that led to this abuse of power. I am a member of the Committee on Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth that has been working through legislation on historical abuse, whether that was in the mother and baby or homes or with institutional burials, including the bodies of children being dumped in septic tanks. We listened to the heart-rending testimonies of witnesses on forced adoptions. As women and children were treated as commodities by the church and the State in baby factories, if this Government cannot see the upset that building a maternity hospital on land that is owned by a religious order has caused, then it is more out of touch than I thought.

During Leaders' Questions today the Taoiseach reaffirmed the Government's position that leasing the land from a religious order is effectively owning the land but this is nonsense. A lease is a lease. If I rent my home I do not own it; the landlord does. The Religious Sisters of Charity, in the guise of St. Vincent's Holdings CLG, is the owner and therefore it is the landlord of the land the national maternity hospital will be built on. There is a yearly payment and this is not ownership of land. We are talking about a €1 billion investment in taxpayers' money being spent on this hospital and the State should own it outright. The Religious Sisters of Charity previously promised to gift the land to the people of Ireland and that means a public hospital on public land. The Government needs to make this happen. The control of the land is important and with this massive State investment should come full ownership.

The State has been in the grip of Governments controlled by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael since the inception of this State over 100 years ago. The reason we need a new national maternity hospital now is a lifetime of underinvestment in women's healthcare by both parties. We need a complete separation of church and State when it comes to women's healthcare and in fact, we need a complete separation from Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil when it comes to women's healthcare. Today the Government signed off on a deal to pass this through and yet it will let this motion go through so that it will not be forced to vote on it and add to public outcry. This is the Government talking out of both sides of it mouth and the public is seeing through it. This is not the first time; it has happened with child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, and other motions that have been put forward by the Opposition. The Government sits over there, nods it head, lets things go through and has no intention of putting things in place. It is a con job and the Government needs to cop on.

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