Questioning the ‘Byzantine’ arrangements for the NMH is not nitpicking – it’s essential
USUALLY, it’s pretty easy to know which side to take. But this ongoing controversy over the relocation of the National Maternity Hospital is proving to be one humdinger of a row. The longer it goes on, the more confusing it gets, not helped by deliberate misinterpretations of legitimate concerns that have been raised along the way.
Of course, there may well be some people out there who think gaggles of nuns still wander the corridors of our maternity hospitals, dressed in bright white, freshly starched cornettes. But in reality, we know there are very few nuns still nursing or directly involved in the running of any of our hospitals.
And while you can understand the frustrations of those desperate to get the new maternity hospital signed off, repeatedly bellowing ‘there will be no nuns’ is missing the point. In fact, it’s patronising, and all it does is deepen divisions and raise suspicions even further.
For many of those questioning the move of the National Maternity Hospital (NMH) to the St Vincent’s campus in Dublin 4, it’s about Catholic ethos. And you don’t need priests, nuns, deacons or whoever to exert that kind of control.
Lay people can be every bit as influenced by their religious beliefs as those who have given their lives up to God’s work. So giving a State-funded hospital, expected to cost in the region of €1billion of taxpayers’ money, to a new governing body, St Vincent’s Group CLG, deserves to be thoroughly questioned and investigated in a transparent manner.
It’s clearly been a very complex process so far. The move from Holles Street to St Vincent’s was first officially proposed back in 2013, but after a series of delays and concerns, the then Health Minister Simon Harris was prompted to send in an industrial relations trouble-shooter, Kieran Mulvey, in an effort to establish a solid and acceptable way forward for the plan.
That was in 2016. It has taken almost six years for the Religious Sisters of Charity to announce they were getting out of healthownership care. Last week it was revealed they had transferred their shareholding in the company that owns the land on which the new NMH will be built, to the newly established charitable trust, the aforementioned St Vincent’s Group CLG.
The land will be leased to the State for 299 years, and legal measures are being put in place to ensure that all procedures allowed by law in Ireland will take place at the new NMH.
It’s been hailed, by those pushing for the project to go ahead, as a huge breakthrough, and any concerns raised by some very reputable experts are being roundly dismissed as ‘misinformation’ and ‘scaremongering’.
You see, that’s the thing: we depend on experts to explain to us, in simpler terms, what is being negotiated on our behalf. And given that it took the guts of six years to come up with what’s been repeatedly described as a ‘Byzantine series of legal arrangements’, there’s little chance most of us have a hope of ever fully understanding what’s been agreed.
So it’s a trust situation. But then you go back to who has been raising concerns. OK, there’s Dr Peter Boylan, the former master of Holles Street, who just can’t seem to let this go. He insists women’s healthcare is his primary concern and claims that because he’s retired, he’s had time to properly go through the literature – time his former colleagues don’t have due to working in an understaffed hospital.
Then there are the politicians, and predictably Sinn Féin are in there – but let’s put them to one side for a moment. The Social Democrats are uneasy, Labour’s Ivana Bacik has been unequivocal about her concerns, and wants, like many people want, the lands on which the hospital to be built to belong to the public.
Then there are the Government TDs, including Heather Humphreys, Helen McEntee, Hildegarde Naughton and Catherine Martin, who are believed to have sought assurances that all legal services, including abortion and sterilisation, would be available at the new NMH.
But perhaps most interestingly, while the HSE board agreed to the deal, two of their members dissented from the decision over and control issues, including leading law professor Deirdre Madden.
It would be hard to find anyone who doesn’t think we need a new NMH. Those in favour of the plan as it stands have described very effectively sub-standard conditions at the current location – women walking, while still profusely bleeding, to a shared bathroom, down the corridor from a multi-bed ward.
And it’s hugely compelling that a large number of staff at Holles Street, including the Master, eminent consultants and, perhaps most importantly, the director of midwifery, Mary Brosnan, are all calling for this memo to go through.
It must be an exhausting process for all involved, to have taken this long to get this far. Of course, the easiest solution was for the Religious Sisters of Charity to gift the lands to the Irish people, properly, with no need for a new company to be established.
But no one seems able to adequately explain why that couldn’t be done.
And what did it take to get the Vatican’s approval to transfer the nuns’ assets over to this new company (something they were required to do)?
These are very reasonable questions. Barking on about conspiracy theories, as if those who raise queries are either half mad, or just thick, isn’t going to help sway public opinion. But then, effective communication is not something we do very well in this country.
They might work on that before they go in front of the Oireachtas Committee on Health next week. And let’s all agree to leave the nuns out of it.