IRELAND
Irish Times
Una Mullally
For a while now, stories about the ownership and governance of the proposed National Maternity Hospital have been bubbling. For a moment, we’ll leave aside the fact that the State is gifting the sole ownership of the €300 million maternity hospital planned for Elm Park near St. Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin to a religious order who have contributed just €2 million of their promised €5 million redress compensation after the publication of the Ryan Report in 2009. The mind boggles that it will be this order – which ran institutions where the abuse of mothers, babies and children occurred – will own our National Maternity Hospital. Talk about GUBU.
It appears that in some ways, the governance issues have been squared off, with all parties involved seemingly satisfied. Rhona Mahony said the hospital will “be clinically and operationally entirely independent in line with national maternity policy”. Minister for Health Simon Harris has echoed this sentiment. Yet the new maternity hospital will have a nine-person board of which four members will be proposed by the St Vincent’s Healthcare Group.
Dr Peter Boylan, the former master of the National Maternity Hospital, has repeatedly queried this arrangement between nuns, hospital, and State. On Thursday on RTE’s Morning Ireland he asked, “The question is why do the Sisters of Charity want to own a maternity hospital?” It’s a valid query. Boylan said that were IVF, sterilisation, abortion and gender reassignment to be carried out at the National Maternity Hospital, it would be the only hospital owned and run by a Catholic order in the world that allowed those procedures. I doubt Ireland is going to blaze a trail of this nature anytime soon
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