The burning question all week has been, “How do you build a hospital?” The answer is probably a bit like the answer the guy in the old joke gets when he asks for directions in Kerry, “You wouldn’t be from here.” off.”
At first glance, this should all be good news. A shiny new hospital so Ireland’s women can have their babies in peace. But this is Ireland. So obviously there had to be war.
The main problem is a complex Vatican conspiracy that goes back generations and that none of us really understand. Let’s call it the St. Vinci Code, and Peter Boylan (former Crusade Master of the NMH) is its Dan Brown, its Tom Hanks, or its Robert Langdon, depending on how familiar you are with the original Da Vinci Code.
Peter Boylan is either the last sane man in Ireland and a fearless hero fighting for justice, or he’s so traumatized by nuns he can’t see clearly. In reality, we probably won’t know which one for 299 years.
The plot is quite complex. It seemed that the mysteries of the St. Vinci Codex were contained in ancient scrolls that we needed to see before we could unearth the truth. So, under intense pressure, the scrolls that everyone needed to read to uncover the truth were released, presumably from the Arc of the Covenant. All of them did not read them immediately, but nevertheless continued the argument. Then we were told that these weren’t the scrolls we really needed to see.
The ones we really needed to see were the really, really secret scrolls between an ancient order of Templars and the Vatican, where apparently there could be an agreement that Swiss Guards or militant stormtrooper nuns would attack the new hospital if anyone’s looking for one tubal ligation. We’ve struggled to keep up, but the Irish have become very adept at taking crash courses in various subject areas at this stage, so we paused our studies of the “Baltic Conflict in the Post-Soviet Era” to focus on the exact medical-legal meaning of “clinically suitable”.
Men googled to find out what a tubal ligation is, and millennials googled to find out what a nun is.
At this point things got a little complicated, so we did what we do best, which is a very simple slogan: “A government-owned hospital on government-owned land”. But that was to misunderstand the sacred secret of the hospitals, which is that they were two hospitals but one corridor. Regina Doherty had perhaps the most improbable “quote of the week” from a politician: “What happens in 299 years?” Between nuns and doctors and advocates on both sides, it was sometimes hard to know which side was actually fighting patriarchy.
For most of the week it seemed like Ellen Coyne, a young Catholic mom, was the only one that made sense and one of the few who had actually done a little research. But the image that might stick in many minds was Peter Boylan prime timecasually, repeatedly, held out his hand to stop journalist Alison O’Connor, who pointed out that she had given birth to a couple of babies of her own, from contradicting him.
