This hospital cannot wait, secularism can
It seems we have a choice. Either we can make further progress along the sunlit path towards secularism, or we can build a new national maternity hospital. We can’t do both. Or to put a finer point on it, we can’t do both at the same time. We might have to wait some while longer for a secular republic, but the consensus is that we can’t wait much longer for the hospital.
The need to replace the crumbling National Maternity Hospital at Holles Street has been under discussion for almost 20 years now. The plan to rebuild it next to St Vincent’s was announced in 2013, and then hit a brick wall last year when the Holles Street board refused to be subsumed into St Vincent’s corporate governance structure.
The deal struck by mediator Kieran Mulvey – which will transfer ownership of the new €300m hospital to the Sisters of Charityowned St Vincent’s Healthcare Group but maintain clinical and operational independence – looks like a rough compromise.
And as compromises tend to do, it has caused uproar. First, there’s power, and the problem of letting a religious order anywhere near reproductive medicine, especially an order exposed in the Ryan report. Second, there’s money, and the problem of ‘gifting’ a €300m State asset to a private organisation.
It does look awful, and the principals must have realised it would look awful, and now well meaning people are having to stand up and defend it because they fear that if this deal is jettisoned, the baby – or at least the hospital where it’s about to be born – will be thrown out with the bathwater.
The Master of Holles Street, Rhona Mahony, has come across as almost desperate in media interviews over the past few days. She says it doesn’t matter who owns the hospital, what matters is how it’s run, and what matters most is that we end up with a new National Maternity Hospital.
Considering the position Mahony is in, her judgment is more to be trusted than that of many of the people who are protesting this deal. For the past five years she has been master of a hospital that has as its chairman the Archbishop of Dublin and that has three priests as ex officio governors, and she has not been hidebound. She gave a memorable speech to the Oireachtas hearings on abortion in 2013, arguing in favour of legislating for the X case, and she says that an average of five terminations are carried out annually at Holles Street under the law, despite the presence of Catholic clergy on the hospital board.
Mahony is right to be worried, as the deal is tottering this weekend. At this stage there’s almost nobody who isn’t annoyed, and that now reportedly includes the people who run St Vincent’s.
Its Sisters of Charity shareholders notwithstanding, Vincent’s is regarded as one of the finest hospitals in the capital, if not in the whole country. But in recent days it has been put across as, at best, a building full of people in wimples saying rosaries over the sick, and at worst, one step up from a Magdalene laundry.
The Catholic Church claims to own over a quarter of healthcare facilities the world over, so this is by no means a uniquely Irish problem. Yet the evidence suggests that, for the medical staff of hospitals nowadays, the religious presence is neither here nor there. It’s a legacy, a mere ghost.
We are still on the path to secularism, in spite of apparent setbacks such as this.
The fact is that even those people who don’t want the separation of Church and State are going to get it anyway, simply because of attrition. Nuns and priests are dying out and there is no one to replace them. We will end up without any religious-run hospitals or schools, eventually. In the meantime we might be patient, and have a hospital.