Alan Kelly (Tipperary North, Labour)
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661. To ask the Minister for Health the year she expects the new national children’s office to be fully opened. [53446/25]

Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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Opening the National Children’s Hospital Ireland (NCHI) is a Government priority. Everything possible is being done to ensure this world-class hospital will open as quickly as possible, on behalf of children, young people, and their families. It is expected to open in 2026. The two satellite centres at Connolly and Tallaght University Hospital that were developed as part of the programme are complete and open, delivering care to the children of the Greater Dublin Area. The facility at Connolly Hospital recently hit a milestone with 100,000 children having been treated there.

At the St James’s site, work towards substantial completion of the hospital is continuing and approaching its final stages. The National Paediatric Hospital Development Board (NPHDB) is focused on ensuring all rooms and spaces within the hospital are completed to the high-quality standard set out in the Contract and befitting a world class healthcare facility. In addition, the technical commissioning of the hospital’s mechanical and electrical systems is underway and will continue until substantial completion.

Ultimately, substantial completion is informed by the main contractor BAM’s programme of works and its delivery against that programme. On 28 August 2025, BAM provided the NPHDB with an updated programme of works. The Employer’s Representative-(ER) the independent third party responsible for administering the contract, has since determined this not to be compliant with the contract. The NPHDB have advised that BAM has committed to provide a further programme update in mid-October.

The NPHDB continues to engage with BAM and to apply all possible contractual levers available to it to ensure substantial completion can be achieved with minimal further delays. The NPHDB has previously and more recently exercised its contractual entitlement to withhold 15% of payments to BAM because of its failure to supply a compliant programme.

The NPHDB has consistently advised that the largest factor contributing to delay on the project is BAM’s continued failure to manage and supervise project execution on site and its failure to resource the project appropriately. The NPHDB reports that productive resources on site for August 2025 were on average 460, compared to approximately 541 in June 2025 and to 900 at the start of December 2024. BAM continues to fall behind its own programme and is not delivering against additional Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) monitored by the NPHDB.

I have been clear that BAM’s focus should now be on enabling phased and methodical additional early access to the appropriate completed areas of the building as soon as possible. This will enable Children’s Health Ireland (CHI) to minimise potential challenges during the post substantial completion phase by easing operational commissioning pressure.

On 18 September, BAM committed to new dates to provide additional early access beginning on 3 November for Phase 1. BAM also committed to provide the balance of the additional early access areas (Phase 2) by the end of November. NPHDB is actively working with BAM to identify all the matters that BAM must resolve to achieve its new stated additional early access dates.

I welcome the fact that BAM has now committed to enabling additional early access for CHI in early November. I expect them to honour this commitment and to substantially complete the hospital soon thereafter.

Once substantial completion is achieved, the rest of the hospital will be handed over to CHI for onsite operational commissioning. In preparation for this operational commissioning phase, CHI started the pre-commissioning phase in July 2023. There is a significant and ongoing programme of work to prepare for the opening, which includes the merge and integration of the three existing hospitals and workforces into one, commissioning of the new hospital site, the build and integration of extensive ICT systems and the electronic healthcare record and migration of staff and services over to the new digital facility on the St James’s campus.

While much focus has been on the challenges faced by the project, it is important to note that once open and operational, the hospital will provide world class facilities to its patients. NCHI will be transformational in how we treat and deliver care to children and their families for decades to come.