Mater site not suitable for children’s hospital

The refusal of planning permission for the proposed new Children’s Hospital on the site of the Mater should be welcomed and should allow some sense to prevail and for the officials at the Department of Health to rise to the challenge and for the first time in their careers, admit they were wrong about forcing through the Mater site and just accept the site is not suitable and move on.

A brand new hospital on a brown field site at the edge of Dublin, with connections to all corners of the country, will be built far quicker than any building planned for a congested run-down dangerous and inaccessible part of old Dublin.

We all know the only reason the Mater site was pushed so hard was because it is based in Bertie Ahern’s constituency and he wanted to keep the nuns on side and also it must be said, the various private healthcare businesses who coincidentally happen to include a lot of former Progressive Democrats. We also know that the Irish civil service has been shaped over the years of Fianna Fáil/PD government so that once something is considered to suit “the party”, the system becomes set so rigid that no amount of empirical evidence can change it. However, as we are repeatedly told, we now have a new government which is going to embrace reform and do things better.

Now it’s James Reilly’s chance to step up to the plate and show he’s up to the challenge of delivering a new children’s hospital. His first step should be to abandon the Mater site. I’m sure there are myriad other perfectly acceptable uses for it, and he should take whatever steps are needed so that work starts on a new building on a new site that suits the needs of all the consumers who will use the facilities, not just those from the Dublin area. That site is not in central Dublin, it’s on the edge of Dublin in the very location where, had that site been picked correctly, in the first place, the hospital would be finished by now.

Desmond FitzGerald

Canary Wharf

London

England