Removing religious influence from Irish Hospitals - The Current Situation,History and How to remove it

Straight out of the Cork Independent comes the following quote, anecdotal perhaps but it illustrates a point that is big news.
http://corkindependent.com/20130808/...at-S70357.html

Admitted under her gynaecologist in a very well regarded religious-ethos hospital, she was in a serious condition and needed an emergency termination. A member of medical staff pulled the husband aside and advised him, in an undertone, to seek a transfer to another hospital in another part of the country, immediately, because he could not guarantee that she’d be given the lifesaving treatment she needed in this hospital, because of its religious ethos. She was transferred to a hospital three hours away by ambulance, and, after being treated as required, made a full recovery.

   

The hospital is not mentioned but with the hulabaloo in media reports one does not have to delve deep into the web to place where this might be (although a number of inferrences could be drawn as to what hospital it could be ). Some of Irelands medical and healthcare establishments are in the clutches of a predator, one that is dying a slow and thankfully agonising death, the catholic church. Fr Kevin Doran ,a priest on the board of governors at the Mater hospital has indicated that the Mater will not perform any abortions as to do so may clash with the ethos of the hospital
http://www.broadsheet.ie/2013/08/07/...really-maters/
(Quote via Irish Times)

“The Mater can’t carry out abortions because it goes against its ethos. I would be very concerned that the Minister [for Health, James Reilly] sees fit to make it impossible for hospitals to have their own ethos.”

   

Illustrating how far their Ethos goes

The three members of the board of Dublin’s Mater Hospital were key to the decision to stop trials of the drug for lung cancer patients.
They objected because female patients who get could get pregnant would have to take contraceptives under the treatment.
The subcommittee of the board – including Fr Kevin Doran – were delegated the task of examining the conditions attached to testing the drug.

Dorans comments come in the wake of the death of Savita Hallenpalavar and others not afforded the treatment. Savita's husband, Praveen was allegedly told that an abortion could not be performed as Ireland was a catholic country. Ireland has a bit of a history though on the topic.

1951 and the Fine Gael lead government collapsed as Dr Noel Browne attempted to pass a bill allowing free maternity care much to the chargrin of John Charles Mc Quaid who subsequently kicked up a storm on the issue. Mc Quaids stance was that firstly the government could not interfere with how a family raised its children and secondly the bill would then lead to the legalisation of contraception and abortion, two positions vehemently opposed by a church who at the time were widely abusing children. Religious influence has since sought to fight against the X Case, euthanasia and stem cell research amongst numerous other topics. The churches position on maternal care is ironic given that some Catholic hospitals supported symphysiotomies until relatively recent years.

The church fought tooth and nail to establish an influence in medical schools over the course of the 20th century (http://www.medicalindependent.ie/142...tough_medicine) seeing a Protestant influence as being contrary to the wishes of the population and being a danger to their position as top dog in society threatening their stranglehold on Ireland.

The Catholic Church’s increasing influence on the administration of hospital care lasted well into the 20th Century and during the 1930s, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Edward Byrne, demonstrated the extent of the Church’s power.

When he discovered that there were plans to merge Harcourt Street Hospital, which was under Protestant management, with St Ultan’s, a multi-denominational hospital for infants under one year, established by GP and political activist Kathleen Lynn in 1919, he “saw red”, according to Dr Margaret O’hOgartaigh, author of Kathleen Lynn: Irishwoman, Patriot, Doctor.

“He was convinced that they were up to something because they were not, for the most part, Catholic and he wanted a Catholic hospital,” she told MI.

The Archbishop informed John Charles McQuaid, who, at that time, was President of Blackrock College but would go on to become his successor, and together they led a campaign to sabotage the merger, paving the way for the establishment of a Catholic-run children’s hospital in Crumlin.

“They said that you couldn’t trust Dr Lynn, and that they [doctors in St Ultan’s] were in communication with doctors in Germany. They accused them of sterilisation, that kind of nonsense,” according to Dr O’hOgartaigh.

“And they also had powerful friends in the government, including people like Sean T O’Ceallaigh, who was Minister for Local Government and Public Health. In the 1930s and early 1940s it was one department and he was basically an ecclesiastical minister. He wanted Catholics in the top jobs and it was about getting your own people in to crucial places. So they got at people and it worked.”

   

In the 90's the church also fought tooth and nail against the needle exchange programmes for HIV positive drug addicts.

Gay Doctors Ireland are looking for a repeal of a section of the Employment Equality Act which allowed religious emmployers to discriminate legally (http://www.imt.ie/news/latest-news/2...ck-repeal.html) . it is expected that this will be repealed in the next while.

Information on the ethos of other hospitals is quite scant but the following article from the Indo offers some fair opinionhttp://www.independent.ie/opinion/an...-26250526.html

This might be acceptable if there were an alternative. But there are no secular hospitals in this country. There is no longer even an Anglican much less a multi-denominational ethos in any of our hospitals (except, of course, for the Rotunda). The liberal (Protestant) ethos of the Adelaide Hospital is supposed to have been preserved as part of the ethos of Tallaght Hospital, but many people, not least members of the Protestant churches, fear for its survival.

The selling off by the Sisters of Mercy of St Michael's Private Hospital in Dun Laoghaire and the Mater Private Clinic in Dublin, is indeed proof, as Mr Sheehan pointed out, that the Sisters are not in medicine for the good of their health: they need to make money. So the Catholic ethos is not necessarily one of high-minded and selfless charity.

Moving forward, there is no harm in being blunt, Irish hospitals are there to treat people and act on the basis of what is factual and not what is of a religious opinion. Ireland has nearly severed the chord of the monster of the catholic church, it needs to take a hammer and smash the head in to ensure its brain dead (although judging by church actions this has already been done). Reilly should remove funding from any hospital or establishment that refuses to treat people based on religious ethos or religious opinion, religious ideals are a personal opinion, not something to be inflicted on the sick and dying. Legislation should be robust to charge those that do not comply with the law and jail time for those who refuse to treat on the basis of religious superstition....