Maternity hospital deal was never a secret, so why the current outrage?

AFTER his tenure as health minster, Brian Cowen famously described the Department of Health as Angola due to the constant faction fighting and the sheer number of political landmines that lie in wait. This week – amid the fall-out from the supposed ‘revelation’ that the new National Maternity Hospital is to be handed over to the Sisters of Charity – Simon Harris will know exactly what Cowen meant as he witnessed one of his department’s rare ‘good news’ stories blow up in his face in spectacular fashion.

Just days after scoring a positive PR goal on funding for Cystic Fibrosis drug Orkambi, Harris found himself attacked from all sides when it ‘emerged’ that the new maternity hospital would be handed over to the St Vincent’s Hospital Group which is owned by the Sisters of Charity.

Opposition parties, left-wing activist groups and atheists quickly seized on the ‘news’ of the ‘secret’ deal and an online poll protesting the plan soon went viral, attracting over 70,000 responses in a matter of days.

However, there is one glaring problem with the narrative that has been doing the rounds thanks to social media. The deal with the Sisters of Charity is not and never was a secret and far from ‘emerging’ this month, it was widely known about as far back as last May. Legal issues involving the site of the new hospital – and its eventual ownership – have been in the public domain since 2013 when the HSE waged a very public PR battle with the St Vincent’s Hospital Group over governance at St Vincent’s public and private hospitals.

Indeed, it was in 2013 that we learned that the St Vincent’s group had used its State funded public hospital as collateral to finance the development of its private facility, an issue that is at the real core of the current row.

As a result, the banks have first dibs on St Vincent’s lands and even if the hospital group wanted to sell the site of the maternity hospital to the State, it probably couldn’t. The banks’ involvement would also make a compulsory purchase extraordinarily difficult.

So, if all this has been known for years – and the full details of the deal were announced at a press conference last November – why the current outrage?

The simple answer would seem to be opportunism on the part of politicians and general ignorance on the part of the public.

Many of the civilian groups so vehemently opposed to the deal seem to have been entirely unaware of the situation and were only alerted to the ‘emerging news’ when it erupted on social media.

Senior politicians – especially those who were in Government when the deal was being finalised – were certainly well aware of what was happening and some appear to be using the current controversy to score cheap political points.

Public ignorance and cynical political games now threaten to completely derail a vital project that will benefit thousands of women and children. That’s the real scandal here.