Aideen Hayden (Labour) | Oireachtas source

With the permission of the House, I will share my time with Senator Marie Moloney.

I take some credit for my own party in saying the national children's hospital was a key Labour Party commitment in the general election and in the programme for Government. Funding for the project has been ring-fenced by the Government and it will represent the single biggest piece of infrastructure to be given the green light in the lifetime of the Government. It is a very important development.

As a parent, I welcome the development. I have had reason to use two of the three hospitals concerned, and irrespective of how wonderful the staff are, the hospitals are not fit for purpose. I welcome the decision, on foot of the Dolphin report, to proceed with the national children's hospital.

I know there are many who are dissatisfied with the decision. Spokespeople for the Mater Hospital, for example, have said its proposed changes would now satisfy the planning requirements. The Children's Hospital Alliance accepts the decision but considers the choice of St. James's Hospital to be a poor one. The alliance favours the greenfield site at Connolly Hospital and wants the Minister to mothball that site for future development. The Minister might bear that in mind.

The McKinsey report, which supported trilocation, has been dealt with by other colleagues. As I presume the Minister will deal with this matter in his reply, I will not go into it. I am concerned, however, that the Minister has indicated that the 2016 deadline for the construction of the hospital will not be met. I ask him to pull out all the stops to ensure it is. In the late 1990s, the Bacon report on housing indicated that it might be possible to expedite the planning process. It is shocking that it took five years from the initial choice of the Mater site to the submission of a planning application. That must not happen on this occasion. The McKinsey report was issued in 2006.

There were many debates before the McKinsey report was issued on a national paediatric hospital. For the sake of argument, I am thinking of when childhood leukaemia services were moved from Tallaght hospital to Crumlin hospital. That resulted in a very significant national debate. It is important we learn from what can only be described as a debacle in the past few years and ensure it does not happen again.

I am concerned about what will happen in the meantime to the existing children's hospitals, namely, Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin, Temple Street hospital and Tallaght hospital. It is critical the services in these hospitals are maintained in the interim. There is always a temptation, even if it is unintentional, to downgrade services when it is known that a service will be moved to another site. In fact, I think a certain amount of downgrading has gone on over the past number of years in anticipation of the building of a national children's hospital.

In terms of the design of the new national children's hospital, I would like the Minister to take two specific things into account. There should be adequate accommodation for parents of children who require hospitalisation. Children do better when their parents are around but, more importantly, it is assumed in the medical services that family will be there to take over part of the care of children. The second point I would like to make is that there must be adequate parking. The parking charges in some of our hospitals are a disgrace and many parents and others are paying exorbitant amounts of money in parking fees which they cannot afford.

Senator Coghlan mentioned that Tallaght hospital took 18 years from initiation to construction even though in 2007 we built 98,000 housing units in this country. Many of our current hospitals are not really fit for purpose. I was in St. Vincent's Hospital recently and the Minister might turn his attention to some of the other hospitals in the country. If it is going to take this amount of time to build a national children's hospital, we should start to move on some of the other hospitals.