‘SHE would be very annoyed with me if I just lay down now. She’d look at me and just say, you know, ‘Get up and fight!’”

Health Minister Simon Harris is due to meet the boards of St Vincent’s Hospital and Holles Street over the national maternity hospital standoff this week amid ongoing public anger over the location of the facility.

Labour Relations Commission chairman Kieran Mulvey is to be drafted in to mediate a dispute between St Vincent’s Hospital and The National Maternity Hospital.

Plans for the new National Children’s Hospital on the St James’s Hospital campus in Dublin will be “vigorously opposed”, Jack and Jill Foundation founder and chief executive Jonathan Irwin said yesterday.

Almost €60m has been spent on the new National Children’s Hospital which has yet to be built, it emerged yesterday.