In 2011, James Reilly, the health minister at the time, submitted a proposal for constructing a new children’s hospital at the site of Mater hospital. However, the health centre’s planning permission was denied by An Bord Pleanála in 2012 which prompted Reilly to form the Dolphin group to reassess the situation. The group suggested St James’s Hospital as the alternative location, which faced criticism for inadequate space and traffic accessibility.
In 2015, a planning application for the new national children’s hospital (NCH) was presented for St James’s Hospital premise. The project estimated a cost of €650 million with a projected finish date of 2020. BAM became the project’s contractor in 2016 after a tender process, with the health minister, Leo Varadkar, showing confidence in completion by 2020 barring any significant worldwide calamity.
However, concerns started surfacing in 2017 over ballooning project costs, despite an already approved construction budget of €983 million. The following years saw parliamentary committee investigations and a review by consultancy firm PwC into the budgetary overruns. The investigatory findings identified considerable deficiencies in areas such as initial planning, budget management, and project execution.
The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 hampered the progress, leading to further delays as BAM submitted revised schedules to the development board, continuously moving the completion date forward. Initially planned for August 2022, the hospital’s completion date was pushed to November due to the pandemic and an agreement with a mediator.
By 2023, the project was expected to reach substantial completion by March 2024, which later got postponed to May 2024 and then eventually to 29th October 2024. As of February 2024, the Government acknowledged another cost hike of the NCH project, where the total sanctioned budget having increased to €2.24 billion from the last known estimate of €1.7 billion.
In May 2024, the Public Accounts Committee held a vigorous session revealing further hold-ups in the completion of the hospital. The contractor, BAM, and the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board (NPHDB) engaged in a blame game over the setbacks, with the former attributing them to alterations in design by the board, while the latter claimed the contractor had inadequately resourced the project. Deputy Prime Minister Michéal Martin also highlighted to the Dáil that BAM had not allocated sufficient resources to the project for an extended period.
February 2025 has been highlighted as the fresh prospective date for the “substantial completion” of the project, signifying the conclusion of the construction works. Despite this, the team overseeing the project could not give assurance that the contractor would meet this date, given that BAM hadn’t provided them with a schedule.
The operator of the newly built children’s hospital, Children’s Health Ireland (CHI), anticipates a time frame of six to nine months for the operational commissioning process prior to the facility’s opening. Consequently, the earliest the hospital could begin admitting patients would be August 2025, although it is likely the reality could be closer to the year’s end.