The new national children’s hospital has attracted “a great deal of adverse and often ill-informed comment”, the chief operating officer of building contractor BAM has told the Minister for Health.
In a letter to Jennifer Carroll MacNeill last month, John Wilkinson said “all necessary resources” were “being and will be deployed” to the project.
The letter comes after the Minister wrote to the BAM Group in April seeking assurances it remained committed and able to meet the agreed programme for the hospital.
The correspondence was partially released to The Irish Times under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act.
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The Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee (PAC) was told last month that BAM had extended the substantial completion date of the hospital from June to September 30th of this year. Patients are now not expected to be treated at the facility until June 2026 at the earliest.
David Gunning, chief executive of the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board (NPHDB), the body overseeing the project, told the PAC that BAM had achieved about 60 per cent of its planned progress set out within its programme in the past seven months.
In her letter to the company, dated April 15th, Ms Carroll MacNeill also sought assurances for early access to “necessary areas” of the hospital that are completed to the required standards and finishes to “support our shared ambition to open this hospital as soon as possible”.
She said the NPHDB had informed her officials that actual progress had fallen behind what was required “in order to meet your own programme, including completion and commissioning of those areas required for early access”.
In response, Mr Wilkinson said: “As you will be fully aware, this is a project which has attracted a great deal of adverse, and often ill-informed, comment in the past but I hope that it is now becoming clear that the hospital, once fully completed, will make an exceptionally important and valuable contribution to children’s health in Ireland for a long time to come.”
Mr Wilkinson said it was “correct” that actual progress had fallen behind programme. He said since meeting the then minister for health Stephen Donnelly in October 2024, BAM had received more than 60 further change orders and employer’s requirements directions “including several that require substantial additional works to be undertaken”.
A change order is a document used to alter the original agreement on a construction project.
Mr Wilkinson said under those circumstances “it is inevitable that the project timeline extends”.
“Notwithstanding the disruption this creates, our project team has worked tirelessly to re-plan the revised work scope and minimise the overall delay, all in the interests of completing the project as early as possible,” he added.
Mr Wilkinson also said BAM was committed to allowing Children’s Health Ireland early access to the hospital.
“We believe that early access can begin in the coming weeks, if the current positive progress continues,” he said.
The latest cost for the project was put at €2.2 billion with building on the site at St James’s Hospital in Dublin beginning in 2016.
