Ellen Coyne

speaker

622 appearances 9 recordings 5 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 18 Jun

Ellen Coyne’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 4.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Pat Kenny Show · The Spat between the government and the Rotunda continues. · 7 Jun 2026 podcast

And while the numbers are small, as far as I know, there's only one consultant obstetrician in the Rotunda who's actually in this position on the contract.

Any new consultants who join will automatically have to be on a public-only contract.

So this is actually something that will become more of an issue over the coming years as more obstetricians retire and as their younger successors start coming through the system.

Well, the other point to that is the private maternity service at the moment only exists because it can piggyback off the public service.

There's a lot of times where the Rotunda, Hollistreet, the Coombe and CUMH are billing insurance companies for care that is effectively public.

Like a baby in NICU will be treated the exact same if it's a private patient as the baby next to it.

But that bill will still be processed.

And the questions that are being asked now is if private service has to rely on and piggyback on public service, are there women in the public waiting rooms and the public wards who are missing out on time with a consultant because that consultant is going to prioritise a section or a delivery from somebody who's paid them €5,000?

So that is kind of the issue.

Private maternity services wouldn't survive if they were outside of a public service.

health service so do those of us who are paying our taxes towards the publicly funded maternity hospitals feel okay with the fact that private uh private health care is happening there benefiting from our taxes but is only available to the minority of the public that can afford it okay the question is how does this get resolved we'll watch this space over the coming days ellen coin political correspondent of the irish times thank you very much

Brendan O'Connor · The Newspaper Panel · 7 Jun 2026 podcast

Nobody is backing down.

This seems like an absolutely intractable dispute between the Rotunda and the state.

People might have seen that the Rotunda decided to have an extraordinary general meeting of its board on Friday, where it considered some of the, I suppose, would you call them threats to its funding, its insurance status, even the Minister for Health suggesting that women who had received private care from public-only consultants might be in line for a refund.

But at that meeting, the board...

Only two known cases.

So people might have some anxieties and think that this is like a widespread issue.

As far as I'm aware, there is only one consultant obstetrician at the Rotunda who is on a public only contract who is continuing to do private care.

The figure of 14 that people see of these 14 consultants who signed that contract, I understand, might relate to people who do gynecology only.

So there was only two babies delivered under that model.

Showing 61–80 of 622 · page 4 of 32