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HEALTH MINISTER JENNIFER Carroll MacNeill has said she can’t give an overall completion date for the long-delayed National Children’s Hospital “that I can stand over”.
The deadline for the completion of the major infrastructure project has been pushed back several times and costs have ballooned from a planned €650m to an expected €2.2bn.
After the completion of construction by main contractor BAM, the hospital will also require a commissioning period of between six and nine months, to install healthcare machines, for example, before it becomes operational.
In March, the Oireachtas Health Committee heard that the hospital is not on track to be handed over by the end of this month, and over 500 staff still need to be recruited in advance of its opening.
In an interview with RTÉ’s Prime Time from inside the hospital this evening, Carroll MacNeill said the hospital would open “seven months after we get the hot block from BAM”.
The ‘hot block’ contains critical care facilities, operating theatres and other core clinical areas.
“That seven months is essential for doing things like testing laboratory equipment in situ. The calibrations are extremely fine, and that really is the time that it takes,” the Minister said.
“Where we have gotten access to parts of the hospital, we have used that. We have fitted this out. But BAM, the contractor, controls the rest of the hospital, and we can only take that when it’s delivered at an appropriate clinical and contractual standard.
“We can’t take rooms with doors that don’t close properly. We can’t take rooms with ventilation systems that aren’t at a clinical standard.”
Carroll MacNeill said there is a timeline in place, but said that the completion date has been pushed back 19 times.
We do have a timeline, but is it going to be met? If you’ve experienced something 19 times, do you expect it to be different on the 20th?
The Fine Gael TD said BAM were being paid €3m per month at one point for the number of people who were working on the hospital, adding that “we would have wanted to be paying them €10m a month to pay the requisite number of people to finish this out”.
“I have been here maybe four or five times in the last four months, and I have never seen the staff that I believe should be here to finish the job and to finish it in a logical way,” she said.
She also said the floors in seven of the 22 surgical theatres had to be redone and that doors that we not closing properly had to be fixed.
“If you’re constantly having to go back and redo work rather than finishing out work, that is going to add to their delays.”
Carroll MacNeill said the contract with BAM does not allow her to force them to bring in additional staff, though she questioned why the contractor had not done this themselves.
“If BAM were so committed to finishing it on their timeline, not mine, why haven’t they made sure that there are additional staff to do that. It doesn’t make sense.”
She added: “I deserve to lose my job where I could take surgical theatres that did not have the appropriate finish on the floor.”
Asked if she had a date for when the government would be given access to the hot block, she said: “Nothing that I can stand over. Possibly the beginning of May, but that was supposed to be the middle of March… I’ll tell you as soon as I get it.”
When asked if there was an overall completition date, she said: “Not one that I’m going to stand over because there’s been 19 before.
“What I want to see from BAM is not dates. I want to see people here finishing the job at the appropriate standards, so that we can take it over.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for BAM said over 4,000 of the hospital’s 5,728 rooms are now complete.
“The current completion rate is around 180 rooms per week – well above international benchmarks for major hospital projects. As viewers can see from the footage they have been shown tonight, this is a highly complex, high-quality project in its final phase, that will be a valuable asset to the Irish state for years to come,” they said.
The spokesperson said it is “not accurate or constructive to state that BAM has continuously missed completion dates”.
“Since the project began, it has seen 25,000 design revisions, with new drawings still being issued in 2026. Each programme update reflects these instructed design changes and additional scope – not a failure of delivery.”
Until the design is fully finalised, completion dates will continue to evolve.
The spokesperson said this was identified as a key risk as far back as 2019, when PwC “highlighted ongoing design change as one of the biggest challenges to delivery”.
They added: “BAM continues to work closely with the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board and Children’s Health Ireland to deliver the hospital as quickly and safely as possible for the children of Ireland.”
BAM is taking legal action against the board of the National Children’s Hospital.
The case was filed in the High Court last December by A&L Goodbody, who are acting for the construction firm.
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