Just 15 per cent of rooms in National Children’s Hospital satisfactorily completed, board tells Minister

Just 15 per cent of rooms in the National Children’s Hospital have been satisfactorily completed, with ‘open snags’ found in many rooms that have been offered for early access, the board of the hospital has told the Health Minister. In a statement, Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill said that it is ‘not credible’ for the hospital’s builders to suggest that large areas of the hospital have been completed since early July, and offered to the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board (NPHDB) for early access. “The NPHDB has stated that many of these offered rooms still have open snags and that in reality only (circa) 800 of these rooms are satisfactory i.e. less than 15 per cent of the overall number of rooms,” she said. “Critically, many of those rooms were ‘chequerboarded’ throughout floors and areas of the hospital rather than being offered in a zoned, consistent or logical manner. “What is needed is whole zones or blocks of rooms, from the ground floor up to the sixth floor in order to gain and benefit from meaningful additional early access for Children’s Health Ireland.” This week BAM, the company contracted to build the hospital, said that this hospital is 99 per cent complete, and that the Minister had only received partial information in relation to the current status of the project. Minister Carroll MacNeill said she was last updated on the project on Tuesday of this week, with information supplied by the NPHDB. “BAM’s suggestion that ongoing design changes are impacting the completion of the hospital is not credible, especially given the fact that BAM is claiming that the project is 99 per cent complete. It is BAM’s responsibility to get its final 1 per cent done,” the Minister added. “What is needed now is for BAM to provide the resources necessary to complete the over 5,800 rooms in this building to the standard set out in the contract and to hand them over to the NPHDB in a logical, methodical and timely manner, first facilitating additional early access as it committed to, and then the timely substantial completion of the entire building.” In May the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee heard that it will be June 2026 at the earliest before the new National Children’s Hospital will admit its first patient, with the completion date for the build being pushed back to the end of next month. A further nine-month period would then be required for the fit-out of essential equipment and transfer of resources. However, Sinn Féin’s health spokesperson said he now believes that no child will be treated in the new hospital before 2027, which would be seven years on from its initial planned opening date. David Cullinane described the Minister’s comments as ‘more finger pointing’ and said the issue was a crisis that the Government ‘simply can’t get on top of’. “We have to go back to the original contract that was signed by Simon Harris. We know that contract was deeply flawed. It was a build as you go hospital,” he said on RTÉ radio.