John Crown (Independent)

Exactly, that is the dilemma we face. I am speaking first so we were not sure about the procedural process. I like to be a constitutional revolutionary anyway. It is worth waiting for. The Cathaoirleach will like it.

Will the Leader ask the Minister for Health to schedule an urgent emergency debate on the plans of the State for dealing with the unfolding crisis in paediatric medical care, specifically with respect to the disclosures made that the two leading largest children's hospital - real hospitals, not some fantasy on some architect's drawing board – have been confronted with catastrophic cutbacks and crises? These crises were precipitated by a strategic decision that all short and intermediate-term investment would be put on hold until the national children's hospital was constructed. This was a valid excuse for delaying certain infrastructural developments in these hospitals because of the sense we would reach the long-promised land of a grand tertiary referral centre for all the children of the State. Now it looks like that project is on hold indefinitely.

Professor Michael O'Keeffe, an ophthalmologist in the children's hospital in Temple Street, bravely came out during the week to inform the State that at the same time as the national children's hospital was put on hold because it would upset the view of Dorset Street and the north inner city, children were having their sight compromised by the closure of operating theatres which meant there were lengthening waiting lists for vision-saving, vision-restoring and vision-protecting eye surgery. He went further to say that he knew from other areas in the hospital that the closure of these operating theatres could have the spin-off effect of placing children's lives at stake because some of the conditions for which they were now being put on waiting lists were life-threatening conditions. Similarly, our colleagues at Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin, an institution on which I have written in defence on many occasions when it was under vicious administrative assault a couple of years ago when its funding was slashed and one which has shown itself to be extraordinarily adaptable at living within ever-shrinking budgetary guidelines at a time when the demand for its services is increasing and the sophistication of the treatments which it offers is broadening, were forced to go public in the past two days to announce that they were issuing what is unheralded in the Irish health system, namely, a public appeal for philanthropic money. This is not for research, but to develop the clinical services in the hospital, in particular the Dickensian conditions which apply in the tertiary care centres for both cancer and cardiology in terms of the bed complement.

The context in which this must all be seen is the extraordinary decision by An Bord Pleanála to reject the siting of the children's hospital last week. Without revisiting the issue ad nauseam, it is well known that there was exactly zero consensus among the medical-paediatric community as to where the hospital should go. Roughly speaking, it shook down along entirely predictable lines. People who worked for one hospital wanted it in their hospital while people who worked in another hospital wanted it in their hospital. These are good people. It was not due to selfishness. Institutional loyalty is something we must admire, but we all agreed that even if the decision was not the one we wanted - for the record, I was in favour of building a new children's hospital in Crumlin, because I thought it was already 80% of a fine international children's hospital - but the opinion was that wherever they picked it, we would all get behind it, support it and get it built. Now it appears that the objections that have been raised to the hospital have nothing, zero, nada, rien, to do with the care of children or the access of the site for people with parking or for public transport. It was based entirely on two criteria. One was the view, which, I am sorry to say to my architectural colleagues, is a wholly subjective observation. The view of the building would have been a whole lot nicer than some of the views with which we have blighted our skyline. The second is the nebulous term of "overdevelopment of the site". Most of what will be in the site is already there. It is not as if they are moving a whole new children's hospital in where none existed. Temple Street exists 200 m away. About half of what was going to the new children's hospital was coming with Temple Street anyway. The maternity hospital in the Rotunda is approximately 300 m away. It is not as if they were bringing the population of Guangju and dumping them in Dublin 1. They are redeploying-----