We'll get a hospital eventually. How it was delivered will come back to haunt Simon Harris
A €1.6bn overrun on a hospital that will open years later than projected. Lessons will be learned, of course. There will be deep introspection. Picture: PA
A €1.6bn overrun on a hospital that won’t open on time — we all know the joke, we just keep changing the punchline.
At this point, the National Children’s Hospital is not just a potentially world-class medical facility, it’s the longest-running joke in Irish history. Except, it isn’t that funny, is it?
Lessons will be learned, of course. Deep introspection. But, the Taoiseach says, the main thing is that the hospital is being built. An over-budget hospital is better than no hospital. Which is a fair point.
The parents of the children currently in Ireland’s hospitals, and the staff who do superhuman work — day-in, day-out — in buildings constructed long before modern medicine was envisaged, will be thankful in 2026 and beyond that this building was just finally done.
That years of argument and debate and wrangling was finally put to bed and something done.
There is no question that an investment in children’s health is an investment worth making, that prioritising those children and their families is as good a spend of money as there is.
Mr Harris made this point in New York, but both he and Tánaiste Micheál Martin argued that the show must go on.
“It’s not good, but my view is that we have to stick with it, and protect the taxpayer as well, and not in any way lose our focus on making sure we protect the taxpayer and get the hospital built as expeditiously and as quickly as possible,” the Tánaiste said, while saying that the developer was “not putting their full weight behind getting this hospital complete” and accepting that the issue of outstanding claims would take some time to unravel.
There is no question that the issue is complex.
This is a major infrastructure project and a complex contract with a lot of people, money, and work involved. It does not behoove us to act like nuanced things are simple.
But what is simple is that, in 2015, the hospital had an estimated cost to the exchequer of €650m and a completion date of 2020.
We are now told that not only will a full four-year Olympic cycle have passed that, but that the completion date has now slipped to 2026 and Health Minister Stephen Donnelly is sounding the alarm that the agreement led by his predecessor (who is now Taoiseach) is not strong enough to move the project on.
In 2018, Mr Harris said that the project is “about more than bricks and mortar”, that it was about bringing a new era.
But in 2017, Mr Harris was willing to put forward a timeline.
“Our children have waited a long time for this new hospital but there is light at the end of the tunnel now,” he said then.
“Site clearance work, which began last year, is almost complete and so we’ll start building works in the next few weeks. I anticipate that the new hospital, which will serve all of the children of all Ireland, will open in 2021,” he said.
Now, it seems, the argument is that the timeline is less important.
The overriding issue is whether the hospital is built at all.
And while the opening of the hospital will herald a sea change in Irish healthcare, there are major questions about how the system worked in this regard, how such a project will now cost so much and arrive so late.
It is an issue that, while Simon Harris will want to focus on the outcome, the process remains important and worthy of interrogation.
Until that interrogation is complete, the Children’s Hospital will be an issue with which Mr Harris will have to contend.
