The big day. The sun shone, marquees fluttered, caterers bustled. Everybody who was anybody was there, ‘old boys’, former nurses, family friends. The No 1 Army band heralded the arrival of the Archbishop of Dublin; His G33race was followed five minutes later by the Tánaiste and Mrs Childers. The Archbishop said Mass for some 1200 people after leading a procession to bless ‘the new Vincent’s’, also known as the Mary Aikenhead School of Nursing. After the speeches came a two-tier lunch, turkey in the cafeteria for staff, cold meats, salads, wines and coffee for distinguished guests. Acquisitions The following year, the Religious Sisters of Charity acquired St Michael’s Hospital, Dun Laoghaire, from the Sisters of Mercy. Thirty years later, in 2001, they established St Vincent’s Healthcare Group to own and manage their hospitals. In 2010, the RSC expanded their portfolio again, mortgaging a publicly-funded asset, St Vincent’s University Hospital, to fund the building of their new private hospital at Elm Park. A decade later, the congregation is poised to acquire a new multi-million maternity facility — set to be one of the biggest in Europe — built and maintained from the public purse. Succession The key RSC objective today is to guarantee that their ethos will continue to determine care in their facilities. The congregation is dying out, so succession problems arise, as they do for religious worldwide, the dwindling owners of hospitals, schools and other non-profit enterprises. The order, which comprises some 250 members in all, mainly in their 70s and 80s, is headquartered in Dublin. Controversially, the congregation refused to pay its agreed €3 million share for victims of institutional child abuse in 2012, following the publication of the Ryan Report into industrial and reform schools. The order subsequently declined to compensate the Magdalene women, having netted €45 million in 2001 from the sale of its land at Donnybrook, Dublin, site of a laundry it ran for over 150 years. The flouting of public-pay policy by the Vincent’s Group was also widely censured. Vincent’s and Holles Street Vincent’s has always had a special relationship with the National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street, a privately owned-corporation under the aegis of the Catholic Archdioceses. For decades, the NMH led the way in symphysiotomy, an operation that unhinged a woman’s pelvis, performed in lieu of Caesarean section by doctors who disapproved of birth control. Today a much more liberal regime prevails. As Tony Farmar’s centenary history of Holles Street shows, medical consultants practised privately in both hospitals from the 1890s. Archbishop John Charles McQuaid was the National Maternity Hospital’s (NMH) all powerful chairman when he performed the opening ceremony at Elm Park in 1970. Today, around 40 per cent of NMH consultants work in the RSC’s hospitals despite the religious restrictions imposed on their practices. A power grab In 2013, Minister for Health James Reilly announced the building of ‘the new NMH’ — then set to cost €150 million — at Elm Park. KPMG had recommended that Dublin’s three private maternity hospitals be co-located with acute general hospitals in 2008. Co-located single-speciality hospitals offer ready access to wider specialist care: hospitals retain their independence while sharing ancillary services. Initial agreement between Vincent’s and the NMH on co-location broke down. In or around September 2014, under a new chairman, James Menton, a former KPMG partner, the nun’s company made a takeover bid for the NMH, reportedly delaying the planning process until Holles Street caved in. The Mulvey report Incoming Minister for Health Simon Harris appointed Kieran Mulvey to broker an agreement between the two warring private entities in May 2016. Four months later, the then deputy chair of the NMH, Nicholas Kearns, and the hospital’s then Master, Dr Rhona Mahony, now a director of the Group, reportedly informed Mulvey that they were willing to dissolve the NMH charter to become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the nuns’ company. This offer was made without consulting either the NMH board or the governors, according to former master and former board member Peter Boylan, a strong opponent of the takeover by the nuns’ company. St Vincent’s Healthcare Group, the company founded by the order in 2001, was now set to own and control the new maternity hospital company, which is to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Group. Mulvey had no public-interest mandate. The report set out detailed proposals for the takeover: it did not question it, nor did it consider who should own the land underneath the new hospital. Simon Harris welcomed the publication of the Mulvey report in April 2017, in a U-turn from the government’s previous support for NMH independence from Vincent’s, expressed by his predecessor Leo Varadkar in May 2016. It was a watershed for the congregation’s plans. Pushback Public opposition grew. A mass demonstration took place at Leinster House, one of many, and over 100,000 signed a petition against the government’s proposal to gift the new facility to the RSC. Peter Boylan publicly expressed his concern that certain procedures would not be available in the new hospital because of its Catholic ethos. Responding on 25 April 2017, the chair of the Group, James Menton asserted that “in line with current policies and procedures at SVHG [the nuns’ company], any medical procedure which is in accordance with the laws of the Republic of Ireland will be carried out at the new hospital”. This is a remarkable claim— later repeated — that gives the impression that abortion and other procedures banned by the Catholic Church were, and would continue to be, provided at Vincent’s hospitals. The Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference healthcare code The Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference issued its ‘Code of Ethical Standards in Healthcare’ in 2018. Abortion is permitted only as a lifesaving procedure. Under all other circumstances, such as rape, the threat of suicide or the diagnosis of a fatal foetal abnormality, abortion is prohibited. Referral for abortion is also banned, because it constitutes “formal co-operation with wrongdoing”, which is “never morally permissible”. Other prohibited practices include artificial contraception, IVF, surrogacy and
