The burning question all week has been “How do you build a hospital?” The answer is probably a bit like the response the guy gets in the old joke when he asks Kerry for directions: “You wouldn’t start from here.”
At first glance, this should all be good news. A brand new hospital so Irish women can give birth in peace. But this is Ireland. So obviously there had to be war.
The main issue at stake is an intricate Vatican conspiracy going back generations that none of us fully understand. Let’s call it the St Vinci Code, and Peter Boylan (former NMH Crusader Master) is its Dan Brown, its Tom Hanks, or its Robert Langdon, depending on your level of familiarity with the original. Da Vinci’s Code.
Peter Boylan is either the last sane man in Ireland, and a fearless hero fighting for justice, or he’s so traumatized by the nuns that he can’t see straight. In reality, we probably won’t know which for 299 years.
The plot is quite complex. It seemed that the secrets of the St Vinci Code were contained in ancient legal rolls that we needed to see before we could find out the truth. So, under intense pressure, the scrolls everyone needed to read to find out the truth were released, presumably from the Arc of the Covenant. Not everyone read them quickly, but continued the discussion anyway. Then we were told these weren’t the scrolls we really needed to see.
The ones we really needed to see were the really top secret scrolls between an ancient order of Templar nuns and the Vatican, where there could apparently be an agreement that the Swiss Guard, or militant stormtrooper nuns, would swoop down on the new hospital if anyone was watching. for tubal ligation. We struggled to keep up, but the Irish had become very good at taking crash courses in various areas of expertise by this point, so we briefly abandoned our studies of the “Baltic conflict in the post- Soviet” to focus on precise medicine. legal meaning of “clinically appropriate”.
Men have googled to find out what a tubal ligation is and millennials have googled to find out what a nun is.
It was all getting a bit complicated at this point, so we did what we do best, which was to boil it down to a very simple slogan: “A public hospital on public land”. But that was ignoring the sacred mystery 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, doctors and pro-choicers on each side, it was sometimes unclear which side was actually fighting patriarchy.
For much of the week, it seemed like Ellen Coyne, a young Catholic mother, was the only one with sense and one of the few who had done a bit of research. But the image that might stick in a lot of people’s heads was Peter Boylan on Prime timecasually, repeatedly, reaching out to stop reporter Alison O’Connor, who pointed out that she had delivered a few babies herself, from disagreeing with him.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/tronc/HPSG2YIOP5ECZEGS7TDQSU3XAU.jpg)
