IRELAND
Irish Times
Pat Leahy
“How do I get to Killarney?” the American tourist asked. “If I were you I wouldn’t start from here at all,” came the reply. An awful lot of policy debates in Irish politics trundle around similar territory. The controversy of the week has been whether the State should give the Sisters of Charity ownership of the National Maternity Hospital when it moves from Holles Street to a new €300 million building on the campus of St Vincent’s University Hospital.
Minister for Health Simon Harris has been lambasted for agreeing to the arrangement. He promises that the nuns will have no influence on the medical care. The current master pleads for the new hospital to be built, whoever owns it. Conditions at Holles Street are becoming intolerable for patients, she says. A forthcoming inquest into the death of one of those patients is likely to underscore the urgency, I’m told.
The concerns that the nuns were going to be sitting in the corner of the delivery room, directing the obstetricians – “Watch it there, doctor! Have you said the rosary?” – were slightly hyperventilated but not entirely misplaced. As my colleague Una Mullally fairly asked in an online column, why do the nuns want to own a maternity hospital anyway?
The answer, I think, is more about money and the protection of assets than about medical practice. The religious orders are not stupid. They can see as well as the rest of us that pretty soon barely any nuns will be left, just as the massed ranks of priests and brothers who taught generations of boys in Ireland’s schools are now a thing of the past. Many regret the passing of the orders; others remember only the crimes that some of them seemed to specialise in. Either way, they are going, going.
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