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LAST UPDATE | 27 Aug
HEALTH MINISTER JENNIFER Carroll MacNeill has sharply rejected claims by construction company BAM that large sections of the long-delayed National Children’s Hospital have been completed and offered for early access, calling the assertion “not credible”.
In a statement this evening, the minister stated that she had been updated throughout the summer – most recently yesterday – on the progress of the construction by the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board (NPHDB).
“It is not credible for BAM to suggest that ‘large areas of the hospital have been completed since early July and offered to the NPHDB for early access’,” Carroll MacNeill said.
The most recent estimated completion date of the state-of-the-art children’s hospital is the end of next month.
The hospital was originally scheduled to be completed in 2020 with a budget of €650 million. The bill has spiralled, and the hospital has been delayed on 15 occasions.
BAM has come under fire repeatedly over the last number of years over the massively inflating cost of constructing the hospital and the many delays.
Carroll MacNeill also dismissed BAM’s claim that ongoing design changes were hampering completion, pointing out that the company has itself said the project is “99% complete”.
“It is BAM’s responsibility to get its final 1% done,” she said.
She noted that, according to the NPHDB, many of the rooms BAM has put forward to the government for early access still have outstanding snags.
Carroll MacNeill claimed that only about 800 rooms (less than 15 per cent of the hospital’s more than 5,800 rooms) are currently satisfactory.
“Critically, many of those rooms were ‘chequerboarded’ throughout floors and areas of the hospital rather than being offered in a zoned, consistent or logical manner,” she continued.
“What is needed now is for BAM to provide the resources necessary to complete the over 5,800 rooms in this building to the standard set out in the contract and to hand them over to the NPHDB in a logical, methodical and timely manner, first facilitating additional early access as it committed to, and then the timely substantial completion of the entire building.”
Speaking to reporters earlier today, Carroll MacNeill said that there is €10m available to BAM from the Hospital Development Board each month to be drawn down to pay for materials, contractors, and subcontractors to deliver the hospital.
Consistently, BAM does not avail of even half of this funding, she said.
Asked about whether the hospital is on track to be completed by the end of September, the Health Minister said, “The single, biggest concern I have at the moment is with BAM: that there are half the number of contractors on site that there have been at the end of last year, that we have provision to pay back €10m a month, from which they’ve drawn down, by my most recent information, about €2.8m – €3m.
“There were 800 to 900 contractors routinely on site every week at the end of 2024. There’s now 400 to 500, and that the work is not being done in a logical and sequential way.
“BAM have clear contractual commitments to this state. The state will enforce those contractual commitments, and we will not be held up by anybody, most especially BAM, the contractor that has been supposed to be paid for delivering a hospital on time.”
The minister said that she would much prefer that BAM availed of the total amount of funding each month and completed the hospital.
She did not respond directly to a question on whether she expects further delays.
“I will look now over the next number of days and weeks of the progress that can be made. Obviously, I expect BAM to have to deliver the hospital as they have committed to and that is a question for BAM – and I would suggest that it’s a matter for their local and global reputation that they honour their contractual commitment to the Irish state, and that there is evidence of them doing so, because at the moment, I don’t have that.”
A spokesperson for BAM said the firm is disappointed to hear Carroll MacNeill’s remarks, which the company said “indicate she has only received partial information” in relation to the current status of the project.
The hospital is more than 99% complete, it said, and due to the specialist nature of the work currently underway it is “entirely normal” that there are fewer personnel on site compare to this time last year.
In response to the issue of the drawdown charges, BAM said that there have been 84 new and revised design changes to the build from the development board, despite an agreement with previous Health Minister Stephen Donnelly that there would be no further design changes.
The majority of the remaining work on the hospital relates to these changes, for which BAM has also not received payment, the company stated.
BAM said it would be “delighted” to welcome the Minister to the hospital to view the “significant progress”.
The firm has been awarded a number of other government tenders despite its part in the dysfunctional build of the new children’s hospital.
Additional reporting by Andrew Walsh
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