Where, exactly, will the witless assault by the PC brigade on our national identity and history end?

JUST before Christmas, staff at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda received a memo which took almost everyone by surprise. ‘While we continue to grow and expand our services here at the hospital, it is my intention,’ wrote general manager Catriona Crowley, ‘to change the name of Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital to one of the following: 1. University Hospital Drogheda. 2. Drogheda Regional Hospital. 3. Drogheda General Hospital.’ Staff would be polled within days, the memo went on, because ‘I feel now is the time for real change at the hospital’. Not only should the services provided be ‘the very best’, but also ‘the integrity and transparency with which we do our business’ should be ‘beyond reproach’.

Now what, do you suppose, did Ms Crowley mean by that? Changing the name of the hospital, after all, is not going to impact on the quality of the service it offers. Sticks and stones may break your bones, to paraphrase a playground chant, but names will never mend them. If a hospital is properly run, if its services are top class, its staff caring and competent and its management fit for purpose, then nobody is going to care a fig what it’s called.

Codswallop

So it can only be that Ms Crowley reckons that the name of the hospital somehow calls its ‘integrity and transparency’ into question. The fact that it has an unapologetically Catholic name, in other words, leaves it open to ‘reproach’. What a load of right-on, achingly liberal, virtue-signalling codswallop.

Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital has image problems, there’s no question about that. The name of Dr Michael Neary, the disgraced consultant obstetrician who performed dozens of needless hysterectomies over a 25-year rampage, will forever taint that hospital’s reputation – whatever it is called.

Two years ago, another former surgeon, Michael Shine, was jailed for sexually assaulting two teenage patients at the hospital. And a spate of neonatal deaths following botched deliveries, including one where the baby’s skull was crushed with forceps, in recent years have all contributed to concerns over the hospital’s maternity services: an internal audit in 2015 survey found a disproportionately high number of undiagnosed breech babies in the preceding two years.

But is it really fair to suggest that this sorry litany is attributable to the prevalence of a Catholic ethos in the hospital?

It is more than 20 years since the Medical Missionaries of Mary, which founded Our Lady of Lourdes on the back of local fundraising in 1957, sold the hospital to the HSE. So if successive managers have been doing their jobs right, then the only legacy of the hospital’s Catholic patrons should be the name. If managers didn’t manage properly, then changing that name looks like a shabby attempt to deflect legitimate criticism onto an identity that is little more than an heirloom.

There will, after all, shortly be an abortion clinic in the grounds of a hospital named after Our Lady of Lourdes: you’d be hard-pressed to find a better metaphor for the complex relationship between this progressive, outward-looking country and the still-cherished traditions of its people and its history.

On Sunday afternoon, at least 1,000 people turned up to protest against the proposed name change. Statistically, up to two-thirds of those demonstrators will have voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment last year. Yet they can reconcile their commitment to an inclusive and compassionate Ireland with the Christian faith to which so many of us still profess allegiance and which is the crucial bedrock of many of the values we share.

Principles

Out of all the world religions, Christianity is the only one that can claim the credit for the principles we call human rights, and which underpin western concepts of democracy, equality, liberty, justice and mercy. It was those values that drove Mother Mary Martin to fundraise for a new hospital for the north-east of this country at a time when the fledgling State would have been hard-pressed to care for, or educate, its children without the aid of the Catholic Church.

You’ve only got to look at a country like India, where the caste system of inherent inequality still prevails and little girls of lowly status can be raped and murdered with impunity, or those Islamic states where human rights are non-existent and women are ranked alongside domestic animals in terms of worth, to appreciate the debt we owe to the Christian faith.

The indecent modern haste to purge Irish public infrastructure of all vestiges of our history and our traditional faith isn’t about tolerance or inclusion: It’s about intolerance and exclusion, it’s about waging a phony war on a phantom foe to burnish your own PC credentials.

Stripping away the relics of our Christian heritage isn’t about ‘multiculturalism’: it’s about targeting one particular culture for derision and contempt, while endorsing modern dogmas and trendy causes with a Stasi-like diktat. Mocking the Catholic Church and its adherents makes you fashionable: disliking Islam means you suffer from a mental illness manifest as an irrational fear or ‘phobia’. Sneer at the one-third who voted against Repeal all you wish, but dare to question the gospel of ‘gender fluidity’ and you will be monstered on social media.

Offence

A young woman was recently asked to leave a UK pub because she wore a teeshirt declaring ‘Woman: Adult Human Female’ – this made her a TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist) and therefore a shameless occasion of offence. And don’t even look crooked at the new religion of veganism... I sincerely doubt that any reasonable, fair-minded immigrants are ‘offended’ by evidence of our Christian heritage, since it was the nature of a society shaped by that heritage which drew them to Ireland in the first place. Unless they landed here by mistake.

Besides, if we start changing familiar names with historic origins, where do we stop? As another protester asked – what about the chapel in ‘The Lourdes’? Will it go the way of Mother Mary’s portrait, which disappeared from the hospital walls? Would the picture of a lay founder have been binned, too? Where, exactly, will this witless assault on our national identity end?

The Taoiseach, to his credit, has said that any change of name for The Lourdes should be decided by public vote, not an arbitrary stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen.

And to judge by the strength of feeling of those who turned out on Sunday to join the protest led by Drogheda Mayor Frank Godfrey, there will be much resistance from the people whose parents and grandparents fundraised and donated to build The Lourdes 62 years ago. That’s not to say they don’t want to see change and progress in their hospital. They do. They want to see more emergency beds available, a second X-ray room opened, an upgrading of maternity services.

They are entitled to see the effort and sacrifice of those earlier generations honoured in a hospital that fulfils the ambitions they had for it, back in 1957. And one that carries the name they gave to it for as long as it stands.