Quick! The nuns are on the run

SO now it looks as if the nuns, if indeed they are nuns at all, have gone off in a huff. Their attitude seems to be, “Well, if you want to be like that about giving us a maternity hospital, then we don’t want it. We never asked for this maternity hospital anyway. So we’re taking our land and we’re going home.”

They wanted us to be more gracious about it. They didn’t want any hassle. They just wanted the hospital built and the keys handed over, and then they would own it, but they would let Rhona Mahony do whatever she wanted with it. There would be no fuddy-duddy Catholic stuff in this hospital. They’d be administering the snip, IVF, wife-swapping, coveting your neighbour’s wife, the works. It would be a Catholic hospital only in the ownership sense. Perhaps it was a first step for the nuns out of traditionally Catholic enterprises. Maybe they were thinking of getting into casinos next. You have to move with the times, right?

And, of course, there are many who will argue that we should give the nuns not just this hospital, but any of the other hospitals they don’t already own. There is a certain type of person who goes all dewy-eyed over the notion of the benevolent dictator that was “Matron”. Matron was not always universally beloved, but there is a school of thought that an imperious nun was better at running a hospital than several layers of ass-covering middle managers and HSE types.

And when you look around at how we’ve let the world go, you wonder if maybe they have a point. Not only should we apologise fast and give them the hospitals, maybe we should consider handing everything over to the nuns. We will pay for it all, obviously, and then we will gift it to the nuns. Their contribution will be the land. Which, let’s face it, through their boss/husband God they own all of. This land is their land.

So really, if we handed over everything to the nuns, we would just be giving them back what is rightfully theirs. And if we build it they will come, and take it over, without allowing their strong religious convictions to interfere at all.

We could probably start with the national children’s hospital. The nuns have always been good with children. Some of the better nuns have been responsible for rearing and selling three generations of children. And, let’s face it, the rest of us haven’t got very far with building a children’s hospital, have we? The nuns could probably bring the budget back down too, by having the novel idea of a children’s hospital built by children, by hand. Maybe they should look at the housing crisis too. The nuns have always had a gift for finding grand, big places to live. We could probably use their ingenuity.

We could consider giving them France then. The French don’t seem to know what they want right now leadership-wise. The nuns would sort that out quick smart.

Forget Macron, meet Matron.