The Minister for Health has there ae “absolutely no plans” to remove maternity services from Portiuncula Hospital.

Leo Varadkar was speaking in the Dáil tonight, about an independent review into seven babies who suffered oxygen deprivation shortly after birth at the Galway hospital. Two of babies subsequently died.

Mr Varadkar said “there are absolutely no plans to discontinue maternal services at Portiuncula, that’s not part of this government’s agenda at all.”

Mr Varadkar went on to say that upon inspection of inquest reports into maternal deaths the most likely factor is the inexperience of staff.

“(T)he deciding factor is not that the staff were too busy to do their job it’s that they made a mistake in reading a CTG (scan) or detecting a foetal heart of something else, and that can often be down to lack of experience or lacks of case volume rather than there not being enough staff.”