Almost half the women who turned up at a Dublin maternity hospital for the first time last year with just days to go before giving birth were Irish, it emerged yesterday.
Dr Sean Daly, master of the Coombe Women's Hospital, said 109 of the 225 women who presented at the hospital with just 21 days to go to delivery were Irish.
The remaining 116 were non-nationals.
The reasons were two fold, he said. "Some people just do not book and come in late and there is also the fact that the Coombe would be a national referral centre and we would get a reasonable number of women referred up from down the country because there might be a problem with the baby or something," he said.
He added that some of the pregnancies might also have been concealed and therefore unbooked.
Dr Daly said turning up late was unsafe and meant the hospital did not have an opportunity to monitor such things as the growth of the baby, the mother's blood pressure or to check the mother did not have diabetes.
He said non-nationals were disproportionately represented among those turning up late.
"They make up 22 per cent of those giving birth but represent 51 per cent of those presenting late," he said.
The numbers of Irish women turning up at the last minute to give birth in the Rotunda is very small, however, according to its master, Dr Michael Geary.
"Percentage wise it's tiny. They would be very few and far between," he said.