Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The new national children's hospital will be completed later this year and will be open and treating children next year. When it is open, it will be an incredible state-of-the-art hospital. It will care for our children for the next 50 to 100 years and it will be comparable if not superior to many of the best children's hospitals in Europe and around the world.

It will be our first digital public hospital, with 300 individual rooms for every child that needs to be admitted and space for their parents to sleep in the room beside them. It will have more theatres, more scanners and facilities we could not even imagine now, compared with what we have at the moment. I look forward to the hospital opening next year and seeing patients being treated there for the first time.

The Cabinet today agreed to increase the maximum allocation for the hospital to €1.9 billion capital, that is, for the build, and €0.3 billion current, that is, for the commissioning, decommissioning and transition to the new hospital, which will happen next year. The total cost will be €2.2 billion, of which €1.4 billion has already been drawn down. The project has taken much longer than anyone anticipated and there will be years of dispute with the contractor about payments even when the hospital is fully open. This will not impact on other projects because the cost of this is spread out over ten to 15 years. We expect handover to occur this year and expect it to be open to patients next year.

It is important when we talk about the entire cost of this project that we do not make the mistake of thinking it is just about building the very large building which we can now all see in Dublin 8 next to St. James's Hospital. It is also the satellite centre in Connolly in Blanchardstown open and treating patients and the satellite centre in Tallaght. It also involves some of the costs associated with the original Mater project and Crumlin and Temple St. hospitals have to be decommissioned too, so it is a huge project across five sites.

On the Deputy's earlier remark, waiting lists in Irish hospitals are going down. We have said that nobody should wait more than ten to 12 weeks to see a consultant if he or she needs to or to get an operation if he or she needs it. While I accept they are still too long, unlike most countries in the world, including the jurisdiction north of the Border, waiting lists in Ireland have fallen for the last two years in a row.

In paediatric spinal surgery, the waiting list has fallen in the past year. While that is not by close to enough, it is important that I correct misinformation because it is the norm in the Deputy's contributions here on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

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