New National Maternity Hospital

The Master of the National Maternity Hospital has said that the agreement reached for locating the new maternity hospital at St Vincent’s is unequivocal, that the hospital will be entirely independent, and that that is written down in black and white.

Dr. Rhona Mahony said the ethos of the hospital will be clinical excellence and that contraception, IVF services, and abortions will be carried out when necessary.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, Dr. Mahony stressed that nuns will not be involved in the operation or running of the hospital.
She said the fundamental principle during the mediation process for the National Maternity Hospital, currently based in Holles Street, was that it would retain its independence and autonomy.
It was important to locate the hospital on the St. Vincent’s campus, because they want patients to have access to wide range of services available there, Dr. Mahony added.

Dr. Rhona Mahony said the ownership of the hospital is a technical detail

The St Vincent's Healthcare Group, owned by the Sisters of Charity, will own the €300m building.
Dr. Mahony said the ownership is a technical detail.

She said that abortions will be carried out, without hesitation, if needed to save a woman's life.
Asked if a woman wants to be sterilised, out of personal need, Dr. Mahony said it will be done.
She said the new maternity hospital will not be practising in St Vincent’s Hospital, but on the campus. This, she said, was in the agreement and there is no doubt about this.

Germany Remembers!

Germany has marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a tribute to the 300,000 ill and disabled people killed under the Nazis' "euthanasia" programme, who are often seen as forgotten victims of that era.

In a solemn ceremony at the German Bundestag, parliament speaker Norbert Lammert said the programme was the first to use gas to murder those considered "unworthy of living" and served as a "trial run for the Holocaust".
"It became the model for the mass murder that would follow in the Nazi extermination camps," he said in a speech attended by Chancellor Angela Merkel and relatives of victims.
Adolf Hitler's euphemistically named euthanasia programme, in which doctors and scientists actively participated, sought to exterminate the sick, the physically and mentally disabled, those with learning disabilities and those considered social "misfits".

Between January 1940 and August 1941, doctors systematically gassed more than 70,000 people at six sites in German-controlled territory, until public outrage forced them to end the overt killing.
But tens of thousands more died across Europe until the war's end in 1945, through starvation, neglect or deliberate overdoses administered by caregivers.
Many also underwent bizarre medical experiments and forced sterilisations because of their supposed genetic inferiority.



During the ceremony, an actor with Down syndrome read out a letter from one of the victims, Ernst Putzki, who wrote to his mother in 1943 describing the inhumane conditions at the institution where he was being held in Weilmuenster, Western Germany.
"Death from starvation is hard on our heels and no one knows who will be next," he wrote.
"Before, the people here were killed more quickly and their bodies were taken for burning at dawn. But this was met with resistance from the locals.
"So now we are simply left to starve."
Mr Putzki died in January 1945, officially of pneumonia.

Ceremonies are held around the world each year on 27 January to remember the World War II victims of the Nazis.
The day coincides with the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland by Soviet troops in 1945.
Of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, one million were murdered at Auschwitz, mostly in its notorious gas chambers, along with tens of thousands of others including Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war.