THE NEW CHILDREN’S Hospital will not open its doors until April 2025, at the earliest, the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee (PAC) heard today.
The Journal.ie reported yesterday that the building completion date in the latest programme is 29 October 2024. However upon the completion date being achieved the “operational commissioning phase” kicks in before the hospital can open for patients.
This morning, Chief Executive at New Children’s Hospital Development Company, Eilish Hardiman confirms the commissioning programme for the hospital will take “at least six months” – meaning the opening date will be at least the end of April 2025 – when a new government is likely to be in place.
The committee was told the spring opening date in 2025 is subject to the contractors completing the works on schedule, which the chief officer of the NPHDB, David Gunning, said he believed was “achievable”.
He said relations with the chief contractor BAM “have improved”, however there a number of outstanding claims.
Hardiman told committee members that there is a “migration plan” to move patients to the hospital once it is up and running.
Moving the three children’s hospitals to the new hospital will be done over a period seven to 10 days.
“Opening up another location would have a significant challenge from a staffing perspective, so this needs to be a pretty narrow period. We don’t intend that to be a long period of migration. Then we close down the the units and Temple Street and Crumlin,” she explained.
Labour’s Alan Kelly said he has long said that the cost of the project is not going to come in under the €2 billion mark. He asked any of the officials to speak up if they disagreed, for which silence followed.
Kelly said there is “not a snowball’s chance that will happen”, he said.
The committee was told that a memo will go to Government by the end of this month or early December as to what the ballpark figure cost the overall new hospital will cost.
In a revelation to the committee, Gunning also revealed that due to the misclassification of tax and due to the wrong tax system being used, a penalty settlement had to be paid to the Revenue Commissioners at a cost of €938,000.
Speaking to Newstalk Breakfast this morning, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said clearly his statement in 2017 that “short of an asteroid” hitting the country the hospital would open in 2020 was incorrect.
Varadkar said it is a “huge project, the biggest we’ve ever done, the biggest the contractor has done”. Pointing to reasons for the delay, he said at no point during the number of years that the project has been under construction has the contractor had the full amount of staff on site that they promised.
He said the hospital will be handed over to the State next year and the year later, patients will be seen there. “This will be one of the best pediatric hospitals,” he added.
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