Child hospital move will be a catastrophe

SOME of your readers have had occasion to benefit from the services provided by the National Children’s Hospital (NCH), now in Tallaght and formerly in Harcourt Street, Dublin. Also Our Lady’s Hospital in Crumlin.

Surprisingly few realise both these hospitals are to be closed down and replaced by a single skyscraper on a gridlocked site at the Mater Hospital in northside Dublin.

There will be no children’s overnight hospital beds south of the Liffey and no full-scale children’s hospital services. Merely a first-aid post called, grandiloquently, an ‘ambulatory’ centre.