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

I will put this point to the Deputy.

It is a good decision today for the women of Ireland and for newborns into the future that we will have a new maternity hospital and a neonatal centre of excellence in public ownership, in State ownership for the next 300 years. When it is built and it is proven to be a good decision I hope that Deputy McDonald and her party will have the good grace to acknowledge that is the case and will not try to erase from the public memory their ongoing downright opposition to it. It is my sincere belief that this will be a hospital that will serve the interests of women in Ireland for decades to come, facilitating all legal and lawful services to be permitted there. It is in State ownership. It is 300 years at a tenner a week. No matter how often the Deputy tries to tell a different story or to spin it or try to present it as not being in State ownership she is wrong by any yardstick. By any legal analysis she is wrong about the ownership. It is precisely what I said to the Minister on the negotiations with the St. Vincent's Hospital Group. It has gone from 99 years with an option of 50 more on the lease to 300 years. In July of last year, the Secretary General of the Department of Health wrote to the chairman of St. Vincent's Holdings Group, Mr. James Menton, making it crystal clear that it was the State's objective and desire to have outright freehold ownership but acknowledged that St. Vincent's was not going to do that, as communicated to the Minister when he had requested that from the chairman in their conversations. There has been an attempt to try to undermine the nature of the freehold lease. Some of it did not last too long. There was an attempt by the Deputy and others to say that it was actually €850,000 not a tenner but when you look a little into the detail it is €850,000 if you do not build a maternity hospital and what we are obliged to do. There is nothing in the lease that is an imposition on the State whatsoever.

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