Leaders' Questions | National Maternity Hospital

Developments over recent days have just compounded our concerns about the proposed new national maternity hospital. Our concerns persist. They are valid and legitimate concerns that remain around the ownership, control and governance of the proposed hospital. The core question for the Labour Party remains that of ownership. It is freehold ownership. We are talking about ownership in perpetuity. That is the difference between public ownership in perpetuity and the leasehold arrangement, a "complicated" arrangement, as Mr. Fergus Finlay describes it, that is currently on the table.

The core point for us in the Labour Party is that we want to see a publicly-owned hospital built on publicly-owned land. That does not mean land that is held on a 300-, 200- or 100-year leasehold where St. Vincent's Healthcare Group is the landlord and the HSE the tenant. It does not mean land that is privately owned by a successor company to a religious organisation.

It is publicly-owned land that we seek. At this stage, in 2022----- [INTERRUPTIONS]

-----we believe the hospital must be built on publicly-owned land. Without that freehold public ownership, our concerns about control and governance remain. They are concerns that arise from any close reading of the text of the documents that have been published. They are around the €850,000 penalty rent clause, the right of the landlord to appoint directors, the right of those directors to nominate a rotating chairperson and the language of "clinically appropriate", language that is not used to qualify the Minister's "Golden Share" in clause 5, but which is used elsewhere in the document. These concerns have not been addressed in recent days and we were not reassured by the interview with the deputy chairperson of the current board of the National Maternity Hospital.

We ask this question again. If a 299-year lease is ownership in all but name, as the Taoiseach and the Government say it is-----

The Taoiseach

It is.

Deputy Ivana Bacik

-----then why not put the matter beyond legal doubt and place the site in public ownership? Seek that the site be gifted to the State or to be sold at a nominal fee to the State, as was the original plan. Why, back in 2017, did the then Minister for Health, Deputy Harris, decide to proceed with this convoluted legal arrangement, rather than insisting then, as the Labour Party said he should, that the site be transferred into public ownership? Why, in 2017, was a decision made to proceed with this convoluted Byzantine legal arrangement, which throws into doubt issues around a lingering ethos? Why was the decision made then to proceed, rather than simply insisting on the land being transferred into public ownership? Why did the State put aside the question of a compulsory purchase order mechanism? Why did the State lose that leverage by which it would have been possible to acquire the site in perpetuity in public ownership? These are the key, valid questions that we in the Labour Party have. For us, the site must be in public ownership. It is simply not good enough that we are contemplating, in 2022, building an €800 million or €1 billion public hospital on land that will remain in private ownership by a landlord and that will not be in the ownership of the State in perpetuity.

The Taoiseach

I was not in government in 2017.

Deputy Ivana Bacik

I am asking about this Government.

The Taoiseach

I have been in the Government for the last two years and I am determined to get things done-----

(Interruptions).

An Ceann Comhairle

Deputies, please.

The Taoiseach

-----in this country, and not go on with endless prevarication and clouding of the issue so the hospital does not get built. That will be the outcome, if the Opposition wants it its way. We do not own that land and we cannot dictate what happens to it. If people do not want to cede ownership, they do not want to cede ownership. By the way, I do not see the logic of a compulsory-----

Deputy Duncan Smith

Why-----

An Ceann Comhairle

Deputy, please.

The Taoiseach

-----purchase order, costing a significant amount of taxpayers' money, being better value than a 300-year lease at €10 a year. I do not understand why the resources that would be wasted on a CPO would not go into the hospital instead. I do not get the logic of the proposition around the CPO five years on. The church is not involved in this, good, bad or indifferent. Surely the Deputy will take the words of Fergus Finlay regarding his experience of what has gone on here. He stated: "Nobody will have a controlling interest, and nobody will have a beneficial interest, except that the minister for health will have a 'golden share'", which protects the reserved powers of the new maternity hospital contained in the constitution. There is a legal constitution there now, which has been transparently published and which gives real protection in terms of the clinical, financial and operational independence of the hospital, but above all that states all services lawfully permitted in the State today and well into the future will be provided.

The Government has no agenda other than to provide the best of healthcare for women in the 21st century and for premature babies as early as 23 weeks who deserve better conditions than they currently have. We are talking about Nightingale wards, with curtains separating mothers at the moment, while in intensive care situations. We are talking about clinical transfers from one hospital to another across the streets of Dublin. Surely that is not acceptable?

There has to be a balance and a degree of perspective about this, which I think is now missing. One would honestly believe that the Government has some hidden, covert agenda to create a healthcare environment or a new hospital that would somehow deny people access to the laws that many of us worked for and voted for, in terms of changing the Constitution or enacting legislation in this House to ensure that women had all lawful services available to them. There is no Government agenda towards that end. There is no agenda here either from the HSE, which is giving the operational licence to the hospital.

It is the HSE that insisted on the language of "clinically appropriate", not anybody else, because it does not want any other type of hospital built other than a maternity hospital. We find consistently on this side of the House our bona fides and our integrity questioned in relation to this, not by the Deputy, I accept, but by many in the debate. There needs to be some sense of calm perspective applied and less clouding of the issues. I say that with respect.

Deputy Ivana Bacik

I am seeking clarity on the issues and I am certainly not questioning the Taoiseach's bona fides. All of us want to see a new, state of the art, modern National Maternity Hospital but we want to see it done right. We do not want to see the mistakes of the past repeated whereby the State has poured millions of euro into maintaining publicly funded hospitals and schools on land that remains in the ownership of religious orders or their successor lay-run companies. That is what we do not want to see. We are happy to engage with the Government. We are glad that the Minister, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, is engaging with us and indeed we will be meeting with him tomorrow for a briefing. We want to ensure that we get this right and that we move away from the mistakes of the past.

There is clearly an agenda lying behind the decision not to gift the land to the State or sell it at a reduced rate. It is not an agenda of the Government or of the HSE, but there is an agenda and a rationale, presumably, behind the decision by the current owners of the land not to transfer it to the State for a nominal sum or indeed to gift it to the State. That is the question we are asking. I do not think any of us on the Opposition benches have got a satisfactory answer as to why the land could not simply be transferred in that way. If there is a willingness to transfer it on a 299-year lease, why not put the matter beyond doubt and provide it to the State in perpetuity?

The Taoiseach

The previous agreement, by the way, had a much lesser lease period. There was very little shouting and roaring about it, actually, after the Mulvey agreement.

Deputy Matt Carthy

That is because Fianna Fáil was the Opposition then.

The Taoiseach

There was very little shouting and roaring. The Deputy was in opposition too.

Deputy Ivana Bacik

We protested in 2016.

The Taoiseach

The Deputy will jump up and down when it suits and when the pendulum swings from opinion poll to opinion poll. That is the modus operandi of Deputy Carthy. Deputy Bacik asked a question.

Deputy Ivana Bacik

We have consistently raised this for five years.

The Taoiseach

I want to make the point that reference was made to the €850,000 and so on. That only applies if the building is sold or turned into something other than a maternity hospital. The whole purpose of seeking the lease was to build a maternity hospital. The whole idea behind going to St. Vincent's in the first place was co-location, which derived from medical expertise which said the best way to guarantee the safety of women and newborn babies is to co-locate with a tertiary hospital. In my view, that decision was taken a long time ago. I believe if we try to revisit that decision we really are looking at some greenfield option which would mean taking another ten years to build a hospital. I genuinely say that to the Deputy