Children’s hospital needs the Tubridy treatment

MICHAEL WOLSEY

I WAS happy when plans for a new National Children’s Hospital were first announced. It would be modern and spacious, an obvious improvement on the three ageing hospitals that shared the medical care of our country’s kids.

I had young children then and, while I hoped they would never need to use the new facility, it was comforting to think it would be here for them.

My children are adults now with children of their own. Two of my grandchildren are already too old for a children’s hospital and a third will be too old by the time it opens (maybe) in 2025.

If that target is missed, as so many others have been, none of my four grandchildren will be eligible for the services of the new National Children’s Hospital. Perhaps it will be available for their children, although I am beginning to wonder whether this monstrously expensive development will ever open its doors.

Down the years there were many arguments about where the facility should be built. The most appropriate choice might have been Tír na nÓg, a fantasy land of youth for a pipe-dream of a children’s hospital. Most histories of this debacle say it began in 1993 when a report from the Royal College of Physicians called for a new hospital. Sadly, I am old enough to know better.

A decade before that there was talk of rebuilding and extending Crumlin Children’s

Hospital. When that proved impractical, a developer offered land, free of charge, for a purpose-built replacement somewhere off the Nass dual carriageway. He even offered to build the structure without

Carmel at celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of Our Lady Immaculate Parish Darndale-Belcamp. Pic: charge so long as he was allowed to put up a private hospital on the same site. This offer was rejected as in some way unethical and at least three other offers of free sites were later rejected - one at Swords, one near Ballymun, and a third at the old Phoenix Park racecourse. Having rejected the opportunity for a free hospital - a free building, at least - politicians across several governments embarked on a process which will give us one of the most expensive hospitals in the world. It will now certainly cost more than €2bn. The price keeps rising as the opening date recedes. Just 27 of the hospital’s

3,000 rooms had been completed by the end of June.

An opening date in May next year is still the target but Spring 2025 now seems a more likely date, even a bit optimistic.

The National Paediatric Hospital Development Board says the developer, BAM, is “not providing sufficient resources to deliver the hospital”. BAM says the problem is that specifications for the hospital keep changing and almost almost 10,000 new drawings have been submitted since 2019. Either way it is a disgrace. In the words of Sinn Féin’s David Cullinane, it has moved from a fiasco to a farce.

Two Dáil committees have investigated the scandal but nobody is much wiser. This is a much more important issue than Ryan Tubridy’s financial arrangements with RTE and it deserves at least the same level of scrutiny: an investigation that looks at the entire, flawed process.

The saga has gone on so long that many of the relevant ministers and officials are no longer with us, but all those who are should be called to give evidence. Every Minister for Health, every Minister for Finance, every Taoiseach, every Tanaiste, every planner and representatives of the contractors at every stage. It is a sorry tale, but let us try to piece together the full sorry story.

I appreciate that such an inquiry could take a long time, but not as long as it has taken to build the hospital and we might just learn a lesson that will stop future projects from sliding into this sort of shambles.

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