'Significant progress' made in National Children’s Hospital's internal controls, State body claims

The children’s hospital is still awaiting a final completion date after the  National Paediatric Health Development Board  revealed earlier this month that construction was set to be delayed for a 16 th time in just five years. File photo: Leah Farrell / © RollingNews.ie

The State body responsible for the new National Children’s Hospital has said “significant progress” was made in 2024 in terms of performance management on the much-delayed project, despite a trebling in legal fees.

The National Paediatric Health Development Board ( NPHDB) said it conducted an annual review of the effectiveness of the internal controls on March 12, 2025.

In a statement of internal control appended to its financial statements for 2024, the board said: “During 2024 significant progress was made in developing and implementing controls, performance management and the mitigation of risk for the NCH construction contract.”

The statement is identical to a pronouncement made in the previous year’s iteration of the board’s accounts.  The children’s hospital is still awaiting a final completion date after the NPHDB revealed earlier this month that construction was set to be delayed for a 16 th time in just five years.

The project first broke ground nine years ago. Its budget has ballooned in the interim from less than €600m to its current estimate of €2.24bn. 

A highly adversarial relationship has developed between the NPHDB and its main contractor BAM for a number of reasons including a multitude of changes to the building’s spec leading to compensatory claims from BAM, the spiralling budget of the project, and the concurrent delays to its completion.

The NPHDB’s financial statements show that legal costs stemming from the construction of the hospital came to €6.1m in 2024, a combination of legal fees totalling €1.7m and litigation and claims defence costs of €4.4m.

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That figure had jumped from a total of €2.03m just 12 months previously.

Some 3,822 contractual claims had been received from BAM by the end of December 2024 valued at close to €900m, the board said, with 698 of them having been withdrawn by the contractor. Five of those have been referred to the courts, it said, with no judgement having been delivered on any of those to date.

Earlier in October the NPHDB informed the Public Accounts Committee that the revised November significant completion date for the hospital would not be met, with more than €1.1m in payments to BAM having been withheld by way of penalty.

Final completion on the mammoth project is not expected to be achieved before next year, following which a six-month commissioning period will commence prior to the full opening of the hospital.