Malcolm Byrne (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Yes. I will simply endorse the earlier comments of colleagues. Senator Fitzpatrick has been so enthusiastic about this issue and in educating the rest of us about it. I pay tribute to her for her work in this space.

Colleagues have asked what this is about. It is not just about the naming of a hospital. It is about recognising the role of women in Irish medicine and healthcare and, more widely, in Irish society. In many ways, history has always been about establishment men. That is who wrote the history and that has been the story for so long. We have a chance to rewrite it. Even in this building, the Women on Walls project has rightly shown that there have been women who made significant contributions to the development of this State over a period. This is rightly about recognising Dr. Lynn for her very significant contributions, as others who outlined her history have said. It is equally about recognising the role of those women, some known and some not so well known, who have contributed to make this country the great place it is today.

If you read Kathleen Lynn's diaries from the 1910s and 1920s and read about the abject poverty in this country - I am not saying we do not have problems today - and compare the society we have today with that of a century ago, they are miles apart. This is now one of the safest places in the world for childbirth. There are more opportunities here for people when they are children and as they grow up. They are safe as regards the support they have in healthcare. Our ambition, and this would be the ambition of people like Kathleen Lynn, should be to have the best children's hospital in the world, and that this be the best place in which to be a child anywhere in the world, which should include access to healthcare as well as education and other services. In a fitting way, the best way to be able to do that is to recognise the contribution of all those women who have brought us to where we are today. It is my view, and I hope the Government supports this, that as a symbol of that, we recognise Dr. Kathleen Lynn and name the new national children's hospital after her.