Jennifer O'Connell
speaker
2,353 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 4d ago
Jennifer O'Connell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
I don't know if you were following it or not, but it kind of arose out of an Oireachtas committee hearing last week, which brought the startling revelation that consultants in the new public-only slaughter care contracts, this is supposed to be public patients-only contracts, and they're paid well for it.
I think they're paid 250 grand a year, are engaged in the Rotunda in private practice.
So they're on public-only contracts.
They're being paid to do public-only work, but they're still carrying on a private practice out of the public hospital that is the Rotunda.
And this is all happening, not just kind of covertly, but with the blessing of the master of the Rotunda, Professor Sean Daly, and the hospital's legal team.
So there's been a lot of commentary around this, as you'd expect.
Fintan wrote a column on Tuesday in which he kind of excoriated the hospital and the consultants.
And actually, the whole idea of
private maternity care which is one I have very mixed feelings on and we'll maybe talk about that but Fintan wrote the idea that we're all born equal is supposed to be foundational to our republic except of course in Dublin's and the world's oldest maternity hospital whose master is making a last stand for the right to be born superior
This is a hospital, he reminds us, that gets 100 million euros a year in state funding.
And it's essentially, as he says, sticking two fingers up to the Solange Care policy, which is... And the centrepiece of Solange Care was that private practice would be removed from public health facilities.
And not only is the Rotunda doing that, it's consciously facilitating the consultants who are paid, as I said, a quarter of a million a year by the state on the explicit proviso that they only do public work.
Right.
Sean Daly doesn't seem to have a problem with it.
The consultants were given a time period to kind of wind down their private practice.
And that time period was three years and it was up at the beginning of this year.
But it's kind of carrying on.
And I think it's a kind of a, I mean, reading between the lines, it seems to be an ask forgiveness, not permission situation.
But it doesn't seem like there's going to be a whole lot of forgiveness coming from Jennifer Carol McNeil or the HSE about it.
So Chris Fitzpatrick has written an op-ed for me for this weekend.
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