Ken O'Flynn (Cork North-Central, Independent Ireland Party)
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867. To ask the Minister for Health the reasons for the repeated delays to the construction and completion of the new National Children’s Hospital, which has reportedly missed contractual deadlines on 16 occasions; the measures being taken to hold the contractor accountable for cost overruns and schedule slippage; the current projected completion date and final estimated cost; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [57376/25]

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.

Two satellite centres delivered by the project at Tallaght University Hospital and Connolly Hospital are complete and open, delivering care to the children of the Greater Dublin Area. In 2024, there were combined attendances at Tallaght and Connolly of over 60,000 for urgent/emergency care and over 29,000 outpatient appointments. Earlier this year, since opening in the summer of 2019, the facility at Connolly hit the milestone of 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 well underway and will continue until substantial completion.

A realistic date of substantial completion is within the gift of the main contractor, BAM, to both commit to and deliver on. Unfortunately, BAM has shifted its anticipated Substantial Completion date 16 times over the last 5 years.

Ultimately, substantial completion is informed by the main contractor BAM’s programme of works and its delivery against that programme. BAM’s latest programme of works provided to the Employer’s Representative and the NPHDB on 28 August 2025, set substantial completion as 24 November 2025. The Employer’s Representative-(ER) the independent third party responsible for administering the contract, has since deemed this not to be compliant with the contract.

The NPHDB has advised that BAM has committed to provide a further programme update later this month which will confirm the dates for phased additional early access and substantial completion and set out how it will achieve those dates.

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 were fewer than 500 in July, August and September 2025, compared to 900 at the start of December 2024. BAM continues to fall behind its own programme and has not been delivering against the additional Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) monitored by the NPHDB. Slow progress by BAM on site has meant that the average payments to BAM are down to less than €3m per month (excl. VAT/RCT) for 2025.

I have been clear that BAM’s focus should now be on enabling phased and methodical additional early access to the appropriate completed parts 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.

In 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 30% of additional early access areas in the Hot Block (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 November. I expect them to honour this commitment and to substantially complete the hospital soon thereafter.

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 - a realistic and credible plan of how it will compete the hospital. A total of €1.14m has been withheld from BAM in respect of August and September 2025 invoices. Separately, the NPHDB has issued a claim under the Contract seeking to exercise its entitlement to liquidated damages.

The NPHDB has also used the contractual levers available to it to encourage BAM to progress claims that are currently before the Courts. Whilst these claims will not delay the opening of the hospital, the NPHDB considers it important to resolve any outstanding claims where it considers the contractor not to have a contractual entitlement.

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.

The current budget, approved in February 2024, is c.€2.24 billion: c.€1.9billion for capital construction projects and c.€360m for Children’s Hospital Programme. In 2018 it was recognised there would be additional costs outside of the then approved €1.433 billion budget. This was clearly set out in the 2019 PwC report into the matter.

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.