THEY used to pour scorn on the Catholic Church,

their arch-enemy, for engaging in useless and stupid debates like how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Now, however, they’re at the same aul’ balderdash.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin tried to point out that the State’s 299-year lease, at €10-a-year – on a site owned by nuns at St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin, earmarked for the new National Maternity Hospital – is as near as dammit to public ownership.

But that’s still not enough for anti-Church purists and legal perfectionists who insist that the State must secure a straight-forward, unconditional, no-ifs-or-buts freehold title to the land Religious Sisters of Charity simply refuse to sell.

Christ Almighty, they’d have you worried about that 9,000-year lease Guinness has down there at St James’s Gate since 1759 and whether its temporary use of that site might disrupt the flow of the world’s best porter to thirsty customers around the globe, what with 263

years already used up.

People need to get a grip. And the hospital needs to be built before the one at Holles Street falls down around the ears of mothers, their babies and partners.

Mr Martin, pictured, has assured the entire country that ‘all legal clinical procedures will be available’ in the new hospital, which will be paid for entirely by the State. Plus, no religious ethos having ‘hand, act or part’ in the new set-up. It appears that some people simply cannot be satisfied, and this dreary debate could extend forever into the future.

It all started about 10 years ago when the projected cost of the new hospital at the St Vincent’s site was about €300m. That shot up to about €800m at the beginning of last year and, judging by the way the Children’s Hospital is now speeding in the direction of at least a €2bn cost, don’t be surprised if a similar bill lands on our lap for the maternity facility.

This interminable nit-picking is costing us a fortune. And must stop.