Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

A lease of a tenner per year for 300 years is not too valuable. We need to bring some common sense and reality to this issue. The motivation of everybody here is to provide a modern hospital. That is the only objective here. Co-location was the origin of all of this. The idea is that if we co-locate a maternity hospital with a tertiary hospital, we get the best outcomes for women and newborns. That is the whole idea. We have only done one such major centre, which is the maternity hospital and neonatal centre in Cork.

The Deputy said this has been done in an unseemly rush. This was announced as a Government decision in 2013. Planning permission was secured for this in 2017. People talk of an unseemly rush.

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