Nuns to be given new hospital

looksee

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bishop-says-new-hospital-must-obey-the-church-jjbgzzn86
This is where it came from.

Sorry Robindch, I see you already posted that link.

I wonder why the Bishop would choose to give such a detailed and specific statement to the UK Sunday Times rather than an Irish newspaper?

magicbastarder

well, the journalist is justine mccarthy, so it's probably the irish london times?

Absolam

Maybe he hoped by avoiding local press he wouldn't have the Sisters of Charity immediately pointing out they're not answerable to him?

Pherekydes

Why didn't The Times/Justine McCarthy spin the headline thus:

Bishop Says Hospital Must Obey Foreign State

Absolam

Because half the English aren't sure which bit of Ireland is a foreign State and which bit isn't

Pherekydes

Absolam wrote: »

Because half the English aren't sure which bit of Ireland is a foreign State and which bit isn't

Hmmm, surely you know I'm referring to the Vatican?

Yeah, of course you do. :rolleyes:

PopePalpatine

Ah, Kevin Doran. Producer of such hits like, "the Church went too far in its apologies". What a charmer.

Absolam

Pherekydes wrote: »

Hmmm, surely you know I'm referring to the Vatican?
Yeah, of course you do. :rolleyes:

Is there any reason you think the English would though? Or were you just playing to the gallery..... :rolleyes:

Hotblack Desiato

PopePalpatine wrote: »

Ah, Kevin Doran. Producer of such hits like, "the Church went too far in its apologies". What a charmer.

A charmer indeed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Doran

In 2005 Doran, in his capacity as a board member of the Mater Hospital, was a member of a three-person ethics subcommittee, along with a nun, Sister Eugene Nolan, who delayed the trial of a new lung cancer drug because female patients taking the drug would have been required to take birth control to avoid birth defects, contrary to the hospital's catholic ethos.

In an interview with NewsTalk Breakfast radio in March 2015, Doran differentiated between Marriage and same-sex relationship: "One [...] is of its very nature, directed towards the upbringing, the care of children, and one which isn't and they can't be said to be the same." and that some people who have children "are not necessarily parents". The Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, subsequently described it as "an unfortunate phrase" and hoped that people were not offended by Doran's comments.

looksee

looksee wrote: »

I wonder why the Bishop would choose to give such a detailed and specific statement to the UK Sunday Times rather than an Irish newspaper?

Presumably because the journalist was clever enough to pose the question. Most other journalists just rehash press releases. Its the Irish edition.

Pherekydes

Absolam wrote: »

Is there any reason you think the English would though? Or were you just playing to the gallery..... :rolleyes:

Dunno why you're bringing the English into it. The Times produces an Irish edition, so the Bishop's interview is likely only in that.

Absolam

No reason other than that it is an English newspaper... for whom Ireland is a foreign State, notwithstanding the fact that they include readers from Ireland in their audience. Still, let's not let a poor quip drag us too far off topic, eh?

Peregrinus

Hotblack Desiato wrote: »

OH had a tubal ligation done during a caesarian in the Coombe, which is nominally nun-run.

This was as a private patient though*, and probably depends on the consultant's own religious views.

On his ethical views, I think you mean.

And of course it always will depend on the consultant's ethical views, regardless of who owns or runs the hospital. You can't force a doctor to provide treatment that he considers ethically impermissible. That's not going to change. All you can do is hope to find another doctor who takes a different view.

magicbastarder

Peregrinus wrote: »

And of course it always will depend on the consultant's ethical views, regardless of who owns or runs the hospital. You can't force a doctor to provide treatment that he considers ethically impermissible. That's not going to change. All you can do is hope to find another doctor who takes a different view.

...and there's another can of worms.

Peregrinus

But not a can of worms that I think is relevant to this thread. Regardless of whether the nuns appoint members to the board of the hospital/own the freehold of the land on which the hospital stands, the medics are always going to take, and implement, ethical decisions in relation to their practice. This may lead them to decline to provide particular treatment which a particular patient is seeking.

robindch

Vincent's was opened in 1970 by the (in)famous Archbishop McQuaid who left people in no doubt as to who was running the place.

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/catholic-ethos-of-st-vincent-s-emphasised-at-opening-in-1970-1.3058316

McQuaid wrote:

It is the unchanging character of a Catholic hospital that every member of its staff accepts with clear assent and fulfils with scrupulous exactitude the moral law that regulates their therapy, medical and surgical [...]

There is one authority that proposes, explains and defends that objective moral law: the teaching authority in the church. On this solemn day when a new hospital, with the blessing of God, has been dedicated to the service of the sick, it is our duty to declare that in this institute every respect shall be shown, in theory and in practice, to the moral teaching of the church.

Delirium

In lieu of Dr Boylan speaking out about the NMH being gifted to the nuns, he has been asked to resign from the board.
https://twitter.com/rtenews/status/856771080827961344

Subsequently, this comes out in response to it...
https://twitter.com/colettebrowne/status/856769625798967300

hinault

Pherekydes wrote: »

Hmmm, surely you know I'm referring to the Vatican?

Yeah, of course you do. :rolleyes:

The EU is a foreign power.

Delirium

hinault wrote: »

The EU is a foreign power.

When was the last time the Taoiseach was head of the Vatican?

magicbastarder

this is getting messier. sean o'rourke has a board member (i think - missed the very start of the interview) on at the moment who is backing peter boylan, in the sense that he finds the call to resign 'regrettable'.

Hmmm... use the RTE land, and don't give a penny to the nuns.

meeeeh

Fintan O'Toole has a great opinion piece in today's Times.

I think even if the redress scheme is ignored, the religious ethos is ignored, why would be national maternity hospital owned and run by anyone but state? It's essential service and not something that should be run as charity. Even symbolically I don't want basic health care to be charity. It's an entitlement and citizens, never mind taxpayers, are entitled for basic health care to be provided by state. Mind boggles how this was even considered acceptable in wealthy western state.

Delirium

Looks like the nuns might have issues regarding the land due to it being used as security on loans.

https://twitter.com/colettebrowne/status/856831359486218240

robindch

meeeeh wrote: »

Fintan O'Toole has a great opinion piece in today's Times.

That piece is here:

http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-church-control-of-hospitals-maintains-myth-of-charity-1.3059489

Fintan O'Toole wrote:

In 1990, my second son was born in the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin. Of the women in the ward with my wife, one was 42 and had just had her seventh child. She was desperate to be sterilised. Another woman was younger - somewhere in her mid-30s - and obviously poor. She had just given birth to her fifth child. She, too, did not want any more children. She wanted, as she put it, 'to have my tubes burnt'. The curtains were drawn around her bed but everyone in the ward could hear the conversation with the doctor to whom she put this request.

The doctor, a woman, was professional and sympathetic. But she was also emphatic: "This is not a decision for you and it is not a decision for me. It is a decision for the ethics committee of the hospital. If you wish to make a request, your file will be sent to the ethics committee. They will read your file and on the basis of the file they will decide whether or not you can have a tubal ligation. But I must warn you that even if they rule in your favour, the procedure will not be covered by your medical card. It will be separately means-tested."

We were ashamed to be listening in on this poor woman's humiliation, but even more ashamed of her absolute powerlessness. There was nothing about it that we did not know already, but that knowledge of how Irish society worked for women - and especially for women without money - took on a brutal reality and a stark clarity: This is not a decision for you. The "this" was her body, her future, her self, her supposed status as a citizen of a free republic. It was what women were told all the time.

This kind of humiliation wasn't just about whether the women got their sterilisations or not. It wasn't about whether the secretive ethics committee would be made up of nice, humane, decent people. (I'm sure it was.) It was about the creation and maintenance of a culture in which people did not have rights. They asked for favours which might be graciously granted or dismissively refused. Our clientilist political system was built on this principle - and so were our public services. We came as suppliants, not citizens.

I thought of this powerless woman when I heard the otherwise almost inexplicable decision to hand the new National Maternity Hospital into the ownership of the Sisters of Charity. It is the culture that made her powerless that explains why a Minister for Health, who was scarcely more than a baby himself when she was having her place in the world made so clear to her, would not see the problem with this decision. Cultures are not just about what people think - they're also about what they don't think. They are most powerful in their unexamined assumptions, the things that seem quite obvious and natural. And it still seems natural even to a politician of Simon Harris's generation that basic public services should be provided as a matter of charity, not of right. The point of the ownership arrangement he agreed to was that a key piece of public infrastructure, paid for by taxpayers, would remain a charitable institution. Not for nothing do the nuns involved have Charity in their title.

Nothing corrodes civic democracy in Ireland quite so badly as the myth of charity. It has a long reach because it has deep roots. It comes in part from the history of colonisation. But its most insidious form is the belief that the Irish would have had nothing were it not for the Catholic Church. The truth is that the church fought ferociously to prevent the development of any form of public education or healthcare that it did not control. It destroyed and then took over the non-denominational national school system in the 19th century. It blocked the extension to Ireland of the sickness and maternity benefits introduced in the UK by Lloyd George's pioneering National Insurance Act of 1911. It stopped the mother-and-child healthcare scheme in 1951.

These key victories shaped and kept alive the idea that Ireland could never fully create a culture in which we as citizens and taxpayers owned our own public services. We evolved a half-baked welfare state, a chaotic and enormously inefficient mix of public, private and charitable provision. And many parts of the political and bureaucratic systems are not unhappy with this. The difference between having rights and receiving charity is accountability. Charity is unaccountable - it speaks to the goodness of the heart not the good of the citizens. And having this unaccountability at the core of so much of our system of public provision doesn't just suit the church - it suits all those whose lives are made easier by not having to answer to the people they supposedly serve.

Ownership is not just a legal concept - it's a state of mind. If we don't own our own hospitals, we don't own our own bodies. And if we don't take ownership of our own State we will always be hearing those words: This is not a decision for you.

looksee

Nothing corrodes civic democracy in Ireland quite so badly as the myth of charity. It has a long reach because it has deep roots. It comes in part from the history of colonisation. But its most insidious form is the belief that the Irish would have had nothing were it not for the Catholic Church. The truth is that the church fought ferociously to prevent the development of any form of public education or healthcare that it did not control. It destroyed and then took over the non-denominational national school system in the 19th century. It blocked the extension to Ireland of the sickness and maternity benefits introduced in the UK by Lloyd George's pioneering National Insurance Act of 1911. It stopped the mother-and-child healthcare scheme in 1951.

It is hard to see how the 'blame the Brits' (or even the Celts, Vikings or Normans) rule fits in here. The only 'colonisation' that produced the 'myth of charity' is, according to the remainder of the paragraph, that of the Roman Catholic Church.

robindch

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin doesn't want to be chair of the board of Governors of the National Maternity Hospital (NMH) and hasn't attended meetings for some years. A spokeslady indicated that Martin had requested two ministers of health to stop appointing archbishops to the role.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/archbishop-seeks-own-removal-from-chair-at-holles-street-1.3062640

robindch

Meanwhile, the latest available edition of the "Philosophy and Ethical Code" published by the Sisters of Charity bans abortion, in vitro fertilization, contraception, the morning-after pill, vasectomies, and no doubt a range of other procedures related to reproduction and sexual health:

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/ivf-sterilisation-and-morning-after-pill-banned-by-sisters-of-charity-1.3064123

Irish Times wrote:

The document states: "any means of assisting conception . . . which bypass the normal marital act in which conception occurs are not acceptable in our health care services." It continues that "extracorporeal conception as it is attained, for example, in the process of in vitro fertilisation, bypasses the marital act and is not acceptable in our health services." The "life and physical integrity of many of the generated embryos are put in grave risk of harm and destruction by the very nature" of the in vitro fertilisation, the code continues.

"In our health care facilities any such procedures in which we do not respect the life and physical integrity of each human being from conception onwards violate the mission of safeguarding life and health," it says.

It is equally clear about vasectomies and sterilisations: they are not permitted. The "sole immediate objective is to prevent or eliminate fertility" and may not be promoted by Sisters of Charity-owned institutions.
Not surprisingly, the document precludes abortion in all circumstances, including the morning-after pill: "Direct abortion is never permitted since it constitutes the intentional killing of the unborn."

.........

robindch wrote: »

A spokeslady indicated that Martin had requested two ministers of health to stop appointing archbishops to the role.

but sure who else would the politicians get away with blaming then . . . .

magicbastarder

Sisters of Charity to ‘end involvement’ in maternity hospital
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/sisters-of-charity-to-end-involvement-in-maternity-hospital-1.3100059

robindch

More text from the sisters here:

http://www.thejournal.ie/sisters-of-charity-st-vincents-maternity-hospital-3414044-May2017/

...includes a note that the two nuns who are on the board of directors will resign with immediate effect and renounce their right to appoint directors. And if SVHG is wound up, that the assets revert to the state, to be used for the provision of healthcare by corporations "with similar values".

There's scope for acting the maggot here, but on the face of it and without seeing the legals, it seems reasonable enough.