Amanda Coughlan

This merits further comment. Grab a coffee and read on, if you’re interested. First, the contractor BAM, easy to attribute blame to them and the government has spared nothing, however it is cheap and lazy to do so. A cursory review of the procurement of the project, breaking ground in the absence of a meaningful and detailed specification meant that any costings were, at best, guesstimates; subsequent ‘on the hoof’ design modifications and late changes to ‘use requirements’ can only result in completion time drift and disproportionately high costs. Thank you, @SimonHarrisTD, the man who you wouldn’t trust with your immersion heater switch, let alone a budget and project of this magnitude. The project was hit by considerable cost increases and, for a period, material shortages as a result of the war in Ukraine to which the government has contributed financially and materially to sustain - cut your nose to spite your face. A farther complication has been the availability of resources for hundreds of tradespeople essential for multiple phases in construction; who can afford housing in the Dublin area to work on this project? Answer: not that many who aren’t already busy in the construction sector, so government policy has actually impacted the availability of labour. So, we’ve started a project without a comprehensive specification, we thus have no real budgetary control, and available labour is not assured while at the same time material and energy costs are spiralling out of control. All of these factors are contributing to significant delays, an unimaginably incompetent Minister cannot make sense of it and hits low against those charged with building something without a specification and demands of last minute changes. It’s everyone’s fault except the Minister of the Department whose responsibility it is - @caulmick has a video of #SimpleSimon denying his responsibility during a Leadership debate at the last election, you have to see it to believe it. The site for the hospital is entirely the wrong place, devoid of ease of access for emergency cases, challenging (at best) for users of the service to get to, and god help you if you need to park a car because of insufficient parking space for staff and families of patients. To further complicate matters with regard to location, the new hospital doesn’t incorporate maternity so a newborn with a complexity only treatable at the Children’s Hospital will have to be ‘blue lighted’ from the new National Maternity Hospital to the new Children’s Hospital… make that make sense. Now that the building skeleton is mostly complete it’s inevitable that snagging will be nightmarish in scope. Operating Theatres are hugely complex facilities, Radiology suites have very specialised support utilities in relation to power and exhaust needs for CT & MRI equipment, in addition to floor integrity and flatness, walls and doors preventing unwanted radiation escape. In-house labs and haematology services have specific requirements for equipment and contamination control. In-house sterilisation services, RO water systems, medical gases, IT infrastructure, the list goes on. Meanwhile, in Finland, children in need of critical and highly specialised care such as organ transplants, neurosurgery, musculoskeletal surgery, can avail of a new Children’s Hospital in Helsinki. The Helsinki hospital cost €170m and 4 years to construct and commission to the point of accepting the first patients. “Ah, but it’s a much smaller hospital with reduced bed capacity compared to Dublin.” Yes, that’s right, because children in Finland can avail of regional centres capable of pr surgical services, including ICU, without the need for them and their families having to travel to the capital; it would be equivalent to us having a dedicated critical care level children’s hospital in every province with the smaller highly specialised and transplant hospital in Dublin… who’d have thought? We could have had a new hospital in each Province and a centre of excellence in Dublin for less and sooner than the spend today on the Dublin New Children’s Hospital. Why have Ministers @SimonHarrisTD and @CarrollJennifer not resigned nor sacked? Why has the life-ending scandal of persistently failing healthcare for our children not resulted in the fall of this government? Have we, as a nation, stopped caring? Wednesday next will mark a year since the untimely passing, the avoidable death, of Harvey Morrison Sherratt, a courageous little boy betrayed by his Country; others went before him and others have since. This must stop. #JusticeForHarvey #BackUs To Harvey’s parents @Stephen63224725 @GillSherratt23 and friends who are celebrating his life today, I’m so very sorry for your loss, but the memory of Harvey and his fight continues, we shall succeed, this government will be held to account.