New Children's Hospital - A symbol of Ireland's scandalous and shady behavior

You're trying to argue for services being near AND far away from people.

You're also arguing non experts are stupid, only experts should decide these things. Well thats how we got to 2+Billion. As a demonstration of experts know best, its not really selling it to anyone.

Given the scale of NCH, and given that construction costs have gone up by 50/60% in an environment where we are already struggling with labour, I'm unsurprised that it's cost as much as it does. It's going to be a pretty incredible hospital and if anybody has been inside either CHI Crumlin or Temple St, you'll know its desperately needed. It's replacing two hospital sites.

While I do agree for transfer of information and some procedures colocation is not essential , it is far more difficult in intensive and emergency situations .

People do need to be on the spot or nearby .

I always felt that the Mater was just as well placed as James' but as we know both are difficult traffic wise . The Mater has the edge imo as it has a bus corridor from the M50 in which ambulances regularly use to fly in with patients .

James' is completely snarled up with residential streets surrounding it . Sick people don't travel on public transport never mind parents with sick children .

And the Mater already has a completely new extra hospital building , built in the last two years up and running on the spot where the Children's Hospital would have been located !

Obviously there must be some major specification differences ?

It's all very disappointing after 40 + years in planning .

We all hope it will be ..in the end . We badly need it for our children , no sorry, its grandchildren at this stage !

However it has been dealt with badly from planning to changing design to ensuring the contracted builder would not delay or would pay for delays , no matter costs rising .

Money has been wasted all along the way , tax payers money , so people have a right to be annoyed .

With all due respect from the beginning it was a lot more than just " parking " with the public .

Access to services is paramount in an emergency and for many parents with sick children adding to that stress trying to get to an extremely congested inner city space , with a sick child , is not just dangerous and stressful it delays urgent treatment.

Anybody making decisions like this who do not take note of publicas well as if not need over and above operational factors needs their head examined ..

Contractor wouldn't have been liable for a large amount of the cost overruns because parameters were changed by the HSE and central government during the project. No sane contractor would've been in agreeance with accepting responsibility for that.

That leaves us with whether these things that needed to be changed should have been caught earlier. Many probably should have but to catch these things would have likely required a more lengthy consultation process which in and of itself would've inflated construction costs even more.

There are many criticisms to make of the Dept. and HSE's approach to this. That Donnelly hasn't been meeting the team frequently isn't acceptable. However I don't think its as straightforward as govt forgetting to include something in a contract. Nor do I think it's just brown envelope culture either. Call me naieve but I think we've moved on a fair bit from those years. A certain degree of this cost inflation is down to the inflationary environment that we're in. It's killing many projects around Europe. Look at HS2, and the countless apartment developments that have been put on ice. At best maybe we could've carved off 10/20% of this inflation with a better management strategy, but I think the original costing was a lowball given what has been added since, and inflation has kicked it to 2bn euro.

The parameters were tailored so only sites like the Mater and James would be in the running.

Saying best clinical care is the only consideration is misleading. If the best clinical care cost 100 Billion. Is best outcome still the only consideration?

That's a bit like arguing that Putin was the only reasonable choice come election time. When hes literally the only choice.

For any plan of any shape the site is too small. Even they squeezed it all in, there would be no room for expansion. Same with James.

Even without NCH there. The Mater (and the general area) its still a nightmare to get to and park at. Even inside the layout is all over the place. If everyone is travelling to the mater on Public transport, why can you never get parking.

Ground transport between the RHK and James. It not a huge distance. However hard to have any other conclusion than the site itself is the issue with this.

Better outcomes, at any cost.

With the goal of co-location, you can't have that + easy access to green space to build for example, a heavy heli helipad. Criticise the premise of co-location if needed, I think its important for the NCH to be colocated, much like the new NMH will be colocated with SVUH. Non-Colocation has led to severe issues in delivering care which is why it was one of the core criteria of the site.

That’s crazy tbf. Why couldn’t they design the site to have a helicopter pad that takes a coastguard helicopter?

Bad design again- should’ve been caught by the PSDP.

Lack of room I assume. Why else put the helicopter pad on the roof.

Which other site? Blanch is too small and already has a CHI site. Tallaght similarly has a CHI site. SVUH is already colocating with the new Mat hospital. Beaumont is too specialised for it to be worthwhile colocating with. St Michaels is a tiny hospital, and the rest are step down centres. Leaving us with Mater and James in terms of what's remaining of the cities national hospitals. James was selected in the end because the site was believed to be better of the two.