The Church of Ireland primate-elect, Bishop Alan Harper, said he feels "a significant degree of concern over the direction that the decision-making process on the proposed national children's hospital has taken and the implications that it has for Tallaght."
Responding to a query from The Irish Times, he continued: "I believe that a historic contribution has been made to the Irish health services by the Protestant community. I hope that this contribution can be safeguarded and enhanced in the future in whatever shape the proposed new national children's hospital takes."
The former Church of Ireland archdeacon of Dublin, Gordon Linney, currently a member of the board at Tallaght hospital, last night took issue with comments on theology made recently by HSE chief executive Prof Brendan Drumm.
Delivering the RTÉ Radio 1 annual Littleton lecture, broadcast on St Stephen's Day, Prof Drumm said: "I do not believe that theological arguments should enter into how we provide care at the tertiary level. It should be medical arguments." He repeated the sentiments last Sunday on RTÉ Radio 1's This Week programme.
Archdeacon Linney said Prof Drumm had "shown a sad awareness of what the word 'theological' meant."
What Prof Drumm was effectively saying was that the views of most Irish people should have no bearing on the provision of care for children and in a context where all three children's hospitals in Dublin had been provided by religious foundations, he said.
He found this "very worrying indeed", not least in a world where medical people were turning to moral theologians for advice where stem cell and genetic counselling issues were concerned.
The view Prof Drumm was advancing was a secular one, he said, "and the secular system alone cannot operate with issues such as birth, life, death." There were "profound moral and ethical matters involved," he said.
Archdeacon Linney also said that when he and Archbishop John Neill of Dublin met the Minister for Health Mary Harney, the Minister of State for Children Brian Lenihan, and Prof Drumm last June, to discuss the decision on locating the new national children's hospital, that "when we raised the ethical issues it was quite clear no one had thought about them."
He was impressed that Brian Lenihan "immediately grasped the issues and their importance". Mr Lenihan later told the Dáil the new hospital would be pluralist and multi-denominational in character.
The archdeacon also told The Irish Times last night that Tallaght hospital had 20 acres available for a new national children's hospital and a new maternity hospital.
He understood this site had been offered to Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children at Crumlin to build on and "which would have its own system of governance and all the support and assistance required from the adult hospital".
