Health

National children’s hospital: Construction firm BAM commits to June completion date

Facility due in 2020 with budget of €650m but four years later final cost expected to be in region of €2.2bn

The Minister for Health believes BAM needs to allocate more staff to the children's hospital site to remedy problems the project has faced.
The Minister for Health believes BAM needs to allocate more staff to the children's hospital site to remedy problems the project has faced.
Olivia Kelleher
Sun Oct 06 2024 - 21:47

Building firm BAM has committed to a completion date of June of next year for the new national children’s hospital in Dublin, Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly, has said.

The hospital was initially scheduled to be completed in 2020 with a budget of €650 million. Four years later the final bill is expected to be in the region of €2.2 billion.

In an interview with RTÉ on Sunday, Mr Donnelly confirmed he had met senior executives from BAM last week.

The National Children's Hospital 'is going to cost more' as the building faces additional expenses due to inflation.

“I met the [company’s] global chief executive in the Department of Health ... It was a pretty open and frank discussion,” the Minister said.

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In advance of the meeting, he said, “BAM signalled that not only were they missing the November deadline, they were now signalling they were going to miss their next March deadline and they were moving it to June”.

[ Resources for national children’s hospital still ‘behind what is required’ to meet completion date ]

Mr Donnelly said BAM needed to allocate more staff to the site to work on the problems the project had faced.

“That has to happen. They have committed to the June deadline. And what I now want to see is a schedule that the [hospital] board acting on our behalf comes back and says, yes we believe this.

[ National children’s hospital to seek damages from construction firm BAM over further delays ]

“My view and the view of our board is that they simply have not had enough workers on site. There’s lots of complexity but, at its core, there haven’t been enough people on site finishing off this hospital.”

Emphasising that BAM had agreed to “stand over” the June deadline, Mr Donnelly said the board was looking at accelerating the work of “commissioning teams” to prepare the building for use.