So the "House of Horne", as James Joyce called it in the "Oxen of the Sun" episode in Ulysses, wants to move to its true spiritual home, the heart of the south side on the Merrion Road, Dublin 4. Sure, it would be the next best thing to a home birth. The National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street's core constituency comes from the southside anyway (if you don't count all those from Africa, Romania and the south-inner city).
So it could be goodbye to all those nasty inner-city problems then, like disadvantaged urban single mothers and a lack of parking. The older Rotunda and the Coombe can have those - they have more than their share already.
New facilities at St Vincent's Hospital would provide a more suitable setting for photographs - not to mention the services of a general hospital. You'd be able to have a baby and get a facelift or tummy tuck at the same time.
There would be sentimental tears shed for the old Holles Street, which was, ironically, founded for the poor of the southside in 1884. The place is history. Oliver St John Gogarty wrote about it in his autobiographical novel, Tumbling in the Hay. But mothers have traditionally called it not a literary landmark or the "House of Horne" (after hospital master Sir Andrew Horne), but the "House of Hell" or the "House of Happiness", depending in what stage they were in their deliveries, when tumbling in the hay was but a memory.
Holles Street is part of what we are. Few women who have had babies there can drive by it without getting sympathetic labour pains. And when Bruce Springsteen's I was born in the USA became a hit in 1984, it was quickly amended to "I was born in Holles Street". (Somehow "I was born in St Vincent's" doesn't have the same ring to it.) But southside mothers would soon forget Holles Street, where they themselves were probably born, once they realised that they could have their antenatal appointments in the same hospital as they were booked to have their babies.
Currently, most southside private patients attend the swish Blackrock Clinic for their antenatal appointments and only glimpse the inside of Holles Street with its antiquated 1930s interiors once they're in labour. They're out of there so fast that the dΘcor probably doesn't sink in.
Obstetricians based at St Vincent's would free up traffic, because they would no longer have to speed between the Blackrock Clinic and Holles Street just in time to pat mothers' hands after midwives have delivered the babies.
Not that Holles Street hasn't kept up with the demands of the southside elite. The 1990s brought us the illustrious Merrion Wing, for private pampered new parents like Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson, but it is usually so overbooked thanks to the southside baby boom that mothers are lucky to get into it. Chances are that private or not, mothers still have to share quarters with three others in "semi-private". Word has it that Mount Carmel Private Hospital in Rathfarnham has been getting more than its share of the high-profile births, like Bono and Ali Hewson's kids, because you really can get pampering and a private room there.
Even if a new St Vincent's maternity hospital was able find the midwives it needed to run the place, improved facilities at St Vincent's would still mean "active management of labour". This was pioneered by Holles Street and arguably its greatest contribution to medical history. Let's hope it becomes history soon, some mothers will tell you, after a dose of oxytocin and an unwelcome "breaking of the waters", both of which intensify labour and are more likely to lead to epidural anaesthetic, not to mention Caesarians.
But let's not get caught up in that business. Let's look forward to convenient parking.