Children's Hospital has cost €873m to-date

In a note for the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), Department of Health secretary-general Robert Watt said that “by the end of this year, it is expected that approximately €873m of the €1.433bn capital budget will have been drawn down”.

Ireland’s new National Children’s Hospital has cost €873m to date, a figure far short of its most recently projected budget, according to the Department of Health.

In a note for the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), Department secretary-general Robert Watt said that “by the end of this year, it is expected that approximately €873m of the €1.433bn capital budget will have been drawn down”.

However, Mr Watt declined to comment on what the projected final spend on the hospital will be, citing issues of “commercial sensitivity”.

He said that the discussion of “future scenarios and the potential cost implications for same” are “very different” from financial information previously provided to the committee.

The €1.433bn budget cited, meanwhile, refers to figures provided to the previous PAC in January of 2019, and does not include ancillary, non-construction costs of €293m which had left the overall budget at that time at €1.73bn.

The build on the campus of St James’s Hospital in Dublin was initially due to have completed in 2020. Mr Watt, in his note, states that the most likely go-live date remains, “after a period of operational commissioning”, the second half of 2024.

Legal claims

The controversial project has been mired in a quagmire of legal claims and accusations between the National Paediatric Health Development Board (NPHDB), the body with responsibility for the construction, and the lead contractor BAM. That has included more than 900 claims made by the builder, worth a total of €446m, regarding perceived changes in the scope of the project.

In May of this year, a moratorium was placed on such claims which was due to last until the end of June. The moratorium remains in place as of the current date however, although the NPHDB has previously told the committee that fact does not mean that further claims will not eventually be lodged.

In February 2021, the NPHDB told the PAC that a fresh analysis of the likely costs of the project would be available within two and four weeks. That analysis has never been published.

Mr Watt said in his note he “would like to reiterate that this analysis… was not a retrospective review”.

“It related to the forecasting of critical paths/scenarios for the optimal completion of the project,” he said.

Future costs

He said that any further information regarding “potential future costs” surplus to the approved budget “would be commercially sensitive and would have to remain confidential”.

He added, however, that “residual risks” remain “for which there cannot be cost certainty”, including inflation, claims, design changes, along with other “uncontrollable” risks such as pandemic supply chain issues, Brexit, and possible changes to building regulations.

The protracted nature of the hospital’s construction has previously been described at PAC as being both “extremely regrettable and quite frankly very worrying”, by committee member and Fianna Fáil TD Cormac Devlin.

The committee heard in July that any break in scheduled work, as seen early in 2021, sees the contractor hampered by having to rehire workers, a process which takes months.