David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The new national children's hospital will be a game changer for the children of Ireland. It will be a fantastic, world-class hospital. It will nearly double surgical capacity and provide the best modern care, which the children of Ireland need and deserve. I want to see this hospital built and opened as soon as possible. I think that is in everyone's interest and it is what the children of Ireland deserve, but the long-running saga of the new children's hospital, a fiasco, it has to be said, from the start, has now descended into farce. There is no certainty about a final cost or a final completion date. There has been no honesty about the scale of the challenges we are facing with this project. We learned this week that the board has reached the end of the road on its original budget. It is looking for hundreds of millions of euro more from the Government to continue this project without any indication of what the final cost will be or when this hospital might open. All the while, 100,000 children are languishing on hospital waiting lists.

The Government has made promises time and again, which the Tánaiste has reiterated, to children with scoliosis that they will get the care they need within four months, but many, as he knows, are still waiting for years. These children need this hospital built and opened as soon as possible.

When the Taoiseach, Deputy Varadkar, was Minister for Health, he said he committed to opening the hospital by 2020 "unless an asteroid hits Earth". In 2019, when releasing a damning PwC report that found major underestimations of cost and extremely poor governance, the Taoiseach said it was his priority to meet the 2023 opening date. It then became March 2024 and in the past few weeks, it changed again to May 2024. Yesterday, astoundingly, the board could give no indication or certainty on when the hospital would be handed over. I have no confidence that this hospital will be open and ready to treat patients in 2024. I think it is a certainty now that it will be 2025, and God knows when in that year.

The board and the contractor are now openly at war and all the while, the costs are rising. This is in nobody's interest. It does nothing to help the children who need this hospital built. It is unseemly and unprofessional and it does not inspire confidence that the Government can deliver this project on time and in cost. We need action from the Tánaiste's Government. We need urgency and we need leadership. What we need now is not more fictitious timeframes or costs. Every timeframe we have been given has come and gone, and all we can see - all taxpayers can see - is more cheques being written, more money being spent, more delays and more cost overruns. We need a real date, we need a real timeframe and we need to do everything possible to ensure this project is brought back on track.

There is a responsibility on the Minister for Health, who is sitting next to the Tánaiste, to get off the sidelines and show leadership, knock heads together and ensure the board and BAM are doing everything possible to make sure this project comes in on time. I am sure the Tánaiste would accept we cannot simply continue to write cheques with no guarantees. Is the Government going to commit more money to this project without any certainty on a completion date? Exactly how much additional funding has been sought by the board, beyond the €1.7 billion already committed?

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