Put the Zuckerberg name on our children’s hospital
If we are letting McDonald’s in, why not go the whole hog and get Facebook to foot the bill, asks Brendan O’Connor
THERE’S a confusing side story to the confusing story of the new children’s hospital. It involves the popular burger clown, Ronald McDonald. Last Tuesday it was reported that the State was facing a further €10m bill for family accommodation at the National Children’s Hospital because they were refusing naming rights to Ronald McDonald. Lots of you will be familiar with the excellent Ronald McDonald House at Crumlin Children’s Hospital, where families can stay when their children are in the hospital. The accommodation is run by the Ronald McDonald House Charity, which is not part of McDonald’s but is affiliated to McDonald’s and gets money from every McDonald’s in Ireland, as well as raising funds elsewhere.
There seems to be an issue around whether the State is willing to have a Ronald McDonald House at the new hospital. Prof Donal O’Shea says it sends the wrong message to have a junk food clown involved in healthcare when childhood obesity is a major health crisis.
There also seem to be issues around the financing of the house. Apparently Ronald and his people originally agreed to give €8m upfront for building 53 units of family accommodation at the new hospital. Ronald then wanted to borrow €7.5m from the HSE which would be paid off over a number of years. Then our old friend construction inflation kicked in and in November, it emerged the price was gone up to €20m, and Ronald apparently offered to pay €10m of that.
The next day, it was reported that the facility would be going ahead and that it would indeed be named Ronald McDonald House — this seemed to be according to Ronald McDonald and his people. The Department of Health, for its part, was saying that Ronald was originally supposed to be covering capital and running costs but was now only offering to cover running costs.
Children’s Hospital Ireland, we were told, was examining philanthropic opportunities but had made no decisions about naming any part of the hospital. Naming rights, we were told, would be confined to specific areas of the hospital, but the overall name of the hospital would not be for sale. So you might have the Supermac’s orthopaedic clinic, or the Snickers dialysis unit, or the Haribo childhood obesity unit. But you would not have the Coca Cola National Children’s Hospital.
To further add to this confusion, we don’t know if the potential house, which may or may not be called after Ronald McDonald, is actually going to be part of the hospital because, oddly enough, delivery of family accommodation is not actually part of the remit of the Hospital Development Board.
Anyway, here’s a modest proposal. If we are not too fussy about where we take our money from, and we are willing to let fast-food companies in on sponsoring aspects of our National Children’s Hospital, how about we get less precious about the overall naming of the hospital and we look to make up a good chunk of the budget overrun by inviting in another slightly controversial sponsor.
Here’s my big idea: the Zuckerberg National Children’s Hospital. Let’s face it, if we’re happy to take a slice of Ireland’s Big Mac action for the hospital, then why not some social media dollars too?
You may think I’ve gone mad. But I haven’t completely.
Firstly, as many of you will know, there is already a Zuckerberg Hospital in San Francisco. Zuck and his wife basically bought the naming rights with a $75m donation. Priscilla Chan herself is a paediatrician and had worked alongside doctors from the hospital formerly known as the San Francisco General Hospital. So she clearly feels a certain affinity with hospitals and their funding difficulties and with children’s medicine.
Obviously there are some people who object to Zuckerberg’s name being on their hospital — nurses have been known to block the Zuckerberg name on their uniforms, and some have spoken out publicly of their discomfort at being sponsored by a company that has been involved in so many scandals regarding abuse of users’ privacy, manipulating people into voting for Trump, Brexit, and so on.
Also, any time the Zuckerberg hospital in San Francisco gets bad publicity, as it did recently for what was seen as unfair billing practices, poor old Zuckerberg tends to get dragged into it, as if he is the owner. But all in all, the hospital still got its $75m, and it didn’t have to cancel building a motorway to Derry to get it.
Another reason this idea might not be as off-the-wall as you think is that the Chan Zuckerbergs have vowed to donate 99pc of their Facebook shares to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a foundation that is focused on making the world a better place through science and education. Now, given what Zuckerberg’s idea of making the world a better place is, that might worry you slightly, but let’s not knock him for everything. It is an extraordinarily generous thing to do. Then again, you could argue that Zuckerberg isn’t really in business for the money, more for the power.
Furthermore, the first big chunk of money the Zuckerbergs committed to the foundation was $3bn, “to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases during our children’s lifetime”. Not some diseases, all. Considering how hard we are finding it to build a children’s hospital in our children’s lifetime, you have to admire their ambition.
While the foundation seems to be mainly focused on improving healthcare through scientific advancement and developing new tools and technologies, the foundation does admit that it is learning as it goes, and it has what you could probably describe as an emergent strategy. So while the foundation doesn’t strictly have the aim of financing hospitals right now, it might be flexible enough on it.
Facebook employs 4,000 people directly or indirectly in Ireland. The lucky 1,000 who work directly for Facebook earn an average of €154k when you count in share options and bonuses. Facebook will add 1,000 more jobs this year and is planning to employ thousands more in coming years. So no one is saying it’s not good to us.
And in fairness to Facebook, it pays tax at about 15pc, which is reasonably high for a multinational operating in Ireland. The most recent figures we have, for 2017, show it made a profit here of €251m and it paid €38.3m in tax. You could get picky about this though, and point out that Facebook channelled €18.7bn in revenues through Ireland in 2017. To which it will reply with a straight face that it had expenses of €17.8bn. So it only made 250m, a profit margin of a mere 1.3pc. All perfectly above board.
So while no one is saying Facebook owes us anything, you have to think that if these companies really want to be part of the community here, they should maybe consider helping out with things. Now never let it be said that Facebook doesn’t do good works here. On a recent visit to lovebomb us and tell us how much we mean to her, Sheryl Sandberg unveiled plans to triple Facebook’s investment in online safety programmes run by the National Anti-Bullying Centre (ABC) and SpunOut.ie, bringing the total investment to €1m. One whole million.
We know that Leo Varadkar enjoys good relations with Sheryl Sandberg. Would it be the maddest thing in the world for him to reach out to her, as they say, and mention to her that it might do the Chan Zuckerbergs no harm to swoop in and sponsor the hospital? Obviously you’d get the usual cribbing from the usual people. But if the Chan Zuckerbergs want to cure all illnesses in their children’s lifetime, why not start curing illnesses in Ireland?
‘You may think I’ve gone mad. But I haven’t’