When the two hospital groups sat down last November to sign an agreement about the new National Maternity Hospital, I'm sure they, and just about everybody else, thought all their travails were behind them.
The agreement had been fraught and had arrived only after exhaustive, fractious and divisive wrangling that had gone through (if my memory is correct) three different sets of negotiations.
All seemed well with the world when Minister for Health Simon Harris made the Kofi Annan-like announcement that all had been resolved.
However, when it emerged last month that the ultimate owners of the site were the Sisters of Charity, it reopened the wound.
There was a concomitance of timing. The upsetting details of the Tuam mother-and-baby home, and similar institutions, were in the public mind. There is a distinct anti-clerical sentiment among the public at the moment - or "nun bashing" as Mattie McGrath put it last week.
Given the level of reaction and outrage (as well as an online petition that collected 100,000 signatures), the Minister has moved to find a “creative solution” to the ownership issue.
None of the three main parties want the hospital to be delayed, but there are different shades of opinion among them on how strong the Government’s claim to ownership might be.
It’s not a clean site, and there are encumbrances. The site is at the centre of the campus surrounded by the main adult campus, and any non-consensual CPO would take a long time.
It's clear at this stage that none of the big parties want to make this issue the Alamo of the debate between church and State. Here's the report by Sarah Bardon and myself on the latest twist.
