Irish Examiner view: Support for planned children’s hospital

Cork University Hospital, where the new children's hospital will be located.

It might be — just a tad — southern smug to suggest with a straight face that the plans unveiled yesterday for a €60m children’s hospital in Cork might well come to fruition long before the national children’s hospital being built in Dublin city centre offers a bed to its first patient.

Equally, it must be hoped that the Cork project does not drag on for at least 23 years and become an embarrassing symbol of administrative ineptitude, budget over-runs, and sectional interests given a free rein.

The proposed Cork University Hospital (CUH) unit will replace a 1978 facility and will have four paediatric surgical theatres in its basement and the capacity to deal with about 1,200 cases annually. This is a very welcome development as families with a child so sick as to need treatment in the capital would have dreaded the ordeal, and the consequential separations, of relying on a facility as inconvenient as the long-promised national children’s hospital in the very bowels of Dublin. That 98% of the patients who reach CUH get all of their treatment there — only 2% need a transfer to Dublin — must go a long way to allay those concerns.

It may tempt fate to suggest that the CUH unit will be in operation before the NCH opens its doors, but there is one way to ensure that: Support this project, one that enriches the entire South, in every way possible. After all, there’s nothing like a little creative pressure and rivalry.