Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

From the outset I want to reiterate that the Aontú policy is to build public hospitals on public land. We believe that both the children's hospital and the maternity hospital should have been tri-located with a hospital on the periphery of the M50. It is a big mistake for both of these hospitals to be located on the sites chosen. We also believe that these hospitals should be run by the State but we are in a situation where the Government has to make a decision on the basis of an organic system that has grown over decades. At this stage, we need to go ahead and build a new national maternity hospital as soon as we can.

I want to thank the National Maternity Hospital for organising a briefing for Opposition parties in Holles Street last week, where the Minister for Health and the master of the hospital were present to take questions. It is incredible that Aontú was the only Opposition party that attended that meeting. Given that this issue has consumed pretty much all of the bandwidth in this echo chamber for the last month, I would ask why Sinn Féin, the Social Democrats, People Before Profit and the Labour Party did not attend the Holles Street meeting to pose questions to the hospital itself.

The key question for us in all of this is the cost to the health of mothers for each year that the building of a new maternity hospital is delayed. That is a key issue. We want to know how many wards are operating at over-capacity right now in the National Maternity Hospital. What is the patient to doctor ratio, the patient to nurse ratio, and the patient to consultant ratio? How many babies are in the neonatal intensive care units relative to the actual capacity of the units? How long does it take to cross the city of Dublin from Holles Street to St. Vincent's Hospital in an ambulance on an international rugby match Saturday, if a mother is suffering a life-threatening medical emergency? These are the key questions. We also want to know how long it would take to start from scratch and build another maternity hospital in another location if this deal collapsed. There was a significant chance that this deal could have collapsed and if we had to go back to the drawing board, we need to know how long it would take before a hospital would be built. Is it ten, 15 or 20 years?

These are the critical, life and death issues that should be at the centre of the debate but they have not been at its centre over the last number of months. It never ceases to amaze me that if there is a choice between a bread-and-butter issue or health issue, on the one hand, or a culture war issue, on the other, most parties of the left will go to the culture war issue like a moth to a flame. The people I talk to at home are consumed by the fact that: there are 1 million people on hospital waiting lists, with many there for years; there are hundreds of people on trolleys every day; accident and emergency delays are now the worst on record, with seriously ill people having to wait 13 hours or more for admission; we have a mental health pandemic in this country; and hospitals faced claims for 105,000 mistakes last year. One would have to be on a pretty high income or have gold-plated health insurance for these health concerns to be relegated below the question of whether there is a crucifix in a hospital. One would have to be fairly well off and have fairly good access to healthcare for those issues to mean less than whether there is a crucifix in a hospital.

It is astounding that Peter Boylan's tweet last night made the big reveal that there is a chaplaincy in St. Vincent's Hospital and this chaplaincy provides information on the television channel on which patients can access mass, if they want. Is this where we are in Ireland in 2022? Forget about the 1 million people on hospital waiting lists. Hold the front page - there is mass in the chaplaincy in St. Vincent's. What is going on in this country at the moment is incredible. Just under the surface of much of these debates is an anti-Catholic invective. I have heard some of the language that has been used on the radio and television and in these Chambers in recent weeks, from Deputy Ó Ríordáin's desire to vet civil servants for their level of Catholic faith and his call to get them out of the schools, to the Social Democrat's motion which stated that the Catholic ethos is a threat to women's healthcare, to Solidarity, People Before Profit blaming the education in Catholic schools for violence against women. All of this is untrue, and much of it borders on hate speech. For hundreds of years in this country, the health service and the education service was provided by the Catholic Church and the volunteer work of men and women. Indeed, the chaplaincy that was attacked in Peter Boylan's tweet is one of the many chaplaincies and organisations which provided comfort and consolation, at great risk to themselves, to believers and non-believers during the darkest days of the Covid crisis.

We are reminded that the only profession not thanked at the official Government remembrance for Covid were the priests and nuns in the State who buried our dead and who consoled our families at great risk to themselves while the people who wrote those speeches were working from home at the time. It is an incredible situation. If one wants to find Catholic ethos in this country, look no further than Sr. Stanislaus Kennedy, Brother Kevin, Fr. Peter McVerry and Sr. Consilio. These are the people who are picking up the tab in areas of government neglect. Priests, parishes and religious people right across the country are moving mountains to help refugees fleeing Ukraine and are sending supplies to the Polish border.

There have been great wrongs carried out by the church in the past, but there has been great good delivered for generations too. For every wrongdoer there were dozens of good people doing the best they could for the right reasons. There is hardly a family in the State that has not benefited from Catholic healthcare or education in the last century. It must be remembered that in the darkest parts of our institutional past the State was equally culpable in those situations. Our healthcare service has grown organically into a pluralist model. Voluntary organisations with different ethos have, in the main, built the health service we have today. Ireland should be a pluralist republic. Catholics, Protestants and dissenters should have the right to be who they are without fear or favour from the State. Pluralism makes Ireland richer, stronger and more diverse.

I hear parties saying the ground should be gifted to the State. Sinn Féin has more than 100 properties in the State at the moment. I suggest that perhaps Sinn Féin gift some of its properties to the State. It is easy to be generous with other people's property. It is much too easy. People should not ask others to do what they will not do themselves. My whole worry about this issue at the moment is that the project could be delayed for another 15 years. It is right and proper to ask the questions. It is important we test this contract to the full extent. We see no evidence proffered as to why it should be stopped. If it is stopped, I believe the mothers and women of Ireland will suffer as a result.

There is one term with which I have a difficulty, and which has been cited over and over again in this debate and it is whether or not something is "clinically appropriate". What does "clinically appropriate" mean? It means a professionally recognised standard of medical care. All hospital decisions should be based on whether something is clinically appropriate or not. If we were to delete the words "clinically appropriate", it means an ideology or a religion or some other issue has to come in on top of it. The idea doctors should make ideological decisions and religious decisions, and should ignore the clinical appropriateness of the decision is absolutely hard to believe.

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