National Children’s Hospital: €2.24bn and years late, who is to blame for scandal? 

The Great Mask of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the New Camp Stadium in Barcelona, the Palazzo Luxury Hotel and Casino Resort in Las Vegas. These are just a handful of some of the most expensive buildings on the planet, and also on the list is the still unfinished National Children's Hospital in Dublin. And when it is open, it will be an incredible state of the art hospital, it will care for our children for the next 50 to 100 years, and it will be comparable if not superior to many of the best children's hospitals in Europe and around the world. First streamed up decades ago, the project has become an ongoing crisis, which has been passed from one health minister to another, all at the expense of the Irish taxpayer. Celtic tie your times with a big bucket of money, so this was going to be a big project. This is not a bike shed of the back of Lentzer House. This is 2.2 billion. Now a new snag list has emerged, detailing a litany of problems with rooms that were supposed to be finished. And meanwhile the cost of the hospital has spiraled out of control, and the latest deadline for completion has been missed. So we're two next for one of the state's biggest and most expensive investments, and when will the doors finally be thrown open to the public? Many years ago, when Leo Bradkair was actually Minister for Health, he said, short of an asteroid heading the planet, the National Children's Hospital would be built by 2020. I'm Ellen Coyne, and today on The Indo Daily, I'm joined by Ireland Editor for the Irish Independent, Fiona Cheyenne, to count the many costs of the National Children's Hospital, and to ask who exactly is to blame. So Fiona, we all woke up on Sunday morning to your story on the front page of the Sunday Independent. The latest shocking installment in what is becoming one of the most expensive hospitals in the world. What is the latest with the National Children's Hospital? Yes, I mean, the latest in general is more overruns in terms of costs and time. What I found interesting about the latest update is just the detail we're now getting about the standard of dip the build that has taken place here. The hospital is ostensibly, the building is finished. They're into snagging and finishing things off here and there. People who have put on extensions onto their house or renovate will be familiar with the notion of the snag list. That scourting board isn't the right color. I needed a double pin socket there, not a single one. Things like that that counterclap needs to be to have a corner put on small little items. What's been outlined here is that there are major issues with what is being presented as the finished product. So what we're being told is there are 5,000 rooms, spaces, corridors, nooks and crannies that you can individually say that's an individual space. And three thousand of them have been finished and not one of them is right. In terms of a snag list, what major items, plumbing, so you don't have correct fixtures and fittings on taps, showers, bats, sinks, vinyl flooring, not down correctly insulation, not done right, handrails, not in place. This is according to the hospital's board, the natural pediatric hospital development board who are in charge of delivering this project. The developer is BAM, internationally recognized, major firm, have an Irish operation, they're a Dutch company overall. BAM has played a huge role in building modern Ireland for over 60 years, providing hospitals, housing, schools, infrastructure, industrial, civic and commercial facilities. And they say we are adhering to the highest standards and there are snag lists and as is the norm I'm going through those, but that none of these rooms are complete until the whole project is finished. So there is clearly a contradiction and a dispute. What's coming across clearly is an absolute breakdown in the relationship between the client and the builder at every level, there are differences of opinion on the delivery of this project. This has all been outlined in a letter from the Minister of Health Stephen Donnelly to the coalition leaders. Stephen Donnelly is the fact we're getting out ahead of an arctic committee hearing this week where all this detail is going to come out and he's putting his hands up and saying, well don't do me but I wasn't around when this project started, we're doing our best. He uses language that, you know, to describe it as explosive is kind of in the hip and he basically says BAM are seeking to extract as much money as possible from the Irish taxpayer. He says they are under resourcing the development of the project by half that there is continual slippage on the timeline. He said that or in a space of weeks it moved by eight months. So the current estimated timeline of when the builder will be finished, their power to the project is May of 2025. Now that was due to be next week, by the way, it was due to be October of 2024 after moving, moving, moving previously. So it was due to be October 24, then it was February 25, now it's May 25, really, we have confidence that that's the day. I want to this government wants children being treated in this hospital as early as possible. I'm not going to get home, look up on whether it's this week in October or this week in November. I want to be very clear, we want and must get full control of this hospital. We can all see the difference this hospital is going to make for children. This is transformative. From there, once the builder moves off site in hands of the keys over to the client, it will basically take six months to fit out the building in terms of your medical equipment. And so on and also to move staff on site. So technically, you'd be looking at an opening day of November of 2025. There is no chance of that happening whatsoever. So you're hitting 2026 now before this project opens. But in the meantime, there's also the bill. So this project started out, depending on what day you start, let's look at more recent times. It was going to be about a 500, 600 million project, okay, I'd expanded into a wider development there in terms of your other hospitals being drawn into the overall project. So you're hitting the billion then, but it then creeps up to one and a half billion. It's now a 2.2 billion. But there are literally thousands of items being disputed between the developer and the board in terms of items of cost. And in that explosive leisure, Stephen Donnelly made the point that Irish taxpayers, if they had this kind of standard of work done in their house in an extension or a new build or whatever, they wouldn't accept it. But it seems like we're either going to have to accept this or pay for it. Yeah, he's making that point that they're not happy with the standard of the finish, which raises all sorts of other concerns about, okay, so how bad are things here? Because you're just talking about individual rooms and the finish on the in effect, which is nagged, which you can impact upon. So, you know, have we heard our other concerns about this building? We don't really know, apart from the aesthetic, I suppose. So there are all sorts of questions now arising about the standard of this build. Bam, for their partners, and no, it's going to be completed to the highest standards. And that there is no issue around this building completed. What they are blaming are what they are calling client-based design changes. But that's basically, they're saying the client keeps on changing what they want. There are all sorts of dispute resolutions in place, and all of that argument has gone legal with bam saying one thing, and the hospital board saying they complete opposite hospital board or saying it's not about design changes, but bam, not doing their job right. This children's hospital is becoming a bit of an infamous project. I was wondering if we could maybe take people back and just give them a quick whistle stop tour of the history of this project. Yeah, you can go back some time and say, well, at what point did somebody say this is what what we need? But most people would say, look, around the 1993, we need a new national children's hospital. The existing facilities as a common children's hospital and temple street were getting a bit dated at that stage, Tala was just coming online, Tala's been a more recent development. The population was spending, technology was changing, the manner of which care is being delivered, is changing as well. So rather similar to the discussions that we've had around maternity hospitals, times have changed, we need more modern facility. Obviously, this was going to be a major project, and it was going to take some time to develop. The decision was ultimately taken that it wasn't going to be on a green field site. It was going to be located beside a major hospital. So Celtic tie your times with a big bucket of money, so this was going to be a big project. And it went through the design stage at that point. The chose location was beside the matter hospital on the north side of Dublin, Bertie Horn was the T-Shuck at the time, so it was all sorts of allegations of what it's only been put there because he's the T-Shuck. Ultimately, that site was determined to not be appropriate because it didn't have enough space. So it went back to the draw on board, then again, then it was an economic crash, as we know. So we're back in post-crash scenario or backward, okay, where are we putting the new children's hospital in the middle of the last decade. And ultimately, they came down between a choice of going out to James Connelly Hospital in Blanchor's Town, which is actually on a big green field site that there's rakes of space out there. But it's not a tier one major hospital and that was the problem of locating it beside there. You wanted a major hospital site there. So it's saying James was isolated upon the location on the campus adjacent to the main hospital and to the DNA and so on, that was picked. There was some labs on it. There were some small buildings and they were going to clear that out. So there was controversy around that, and the less people were saying, you know, city center, you're driving with a sick kid, you're going to get stuck in traffic. The argument for James was it's pretty much beside Houston Station. The Lewis line goes through the middle of it. It's not a completely inaccessible place. You can come at it from a number of different angles. And if this hospital has got adequate parking for parents, then that will be a positive. So you have got, you had this hospital built there in two phases. One was the ground works, clear the site, moved those buildings that were there to other parts of the hospital or expand them. That was all done. That took a few years. And then 2019, basically the building work began on the hospital itself and if anybody has been out there, it is an enormous edifice, basically it's a huge building, probably if not the biggest in the country. It looks, it's around about the size of the stadium. After years of delays and debates, the new children's hospital is taking shape. Outside, the frame of the building is now complete. Inside too, the work goes on. It has been dug, as both by controversy in terms of that escalation of price and the timeline. But we're there now. There's no question now. We're not putting this somewhere else. It's built. It's now a question of getting it finished and getting it open running. Yeah. So you get to that point where the project is screenless, they've cleared the site. They've started building, as you said, that they have this giant building there. They've gotten through the controversies about where it's going to be located. I think at one point, a controversy about what it was going to be named. There was some issue with calling it the Phoenix hospital and the hospital in America that was threatening to sue. It seems like at that point, the controversy should have been behind it. But we get to 2017, 2018. It first starts to emerge that the costs are starting to overrun. Yeah, we start to see reports emerging. In terms of transparency, and you would think that these are the kinds of things that the Iraq Discommittees and so on, should be getting regular updates on the dawn. It was privately coming out. Chunu's paper reports, or Karl Wanderer's penance, it's going a well above the figure now. This pattern continues. So, Iraq Discommittees started taking note, getting involved in terms of reporting upon that. The argument from the government was, look, we're building this major hospital construction costs change, modern technology costs more money. We've gone bigger than we originally expected. They were also developing on salary facilities around the cities. You're not trying everybody into this location. If your child has got a minor injury, then there are clinics. For example, out in Connolly Hospital, Antala, where they can go to instead. So, that was the whole idea. You've got a broken arm. You go out to those places and they put a cast on you. You've got a serious heart condition, well, then you need to be inside in the main hospital. So, it was all about making the big children's hospital. You want for the more serious cases, not a minor injury, clinic, in effect. So, part of that is why the costs went up because you were including all these other elements. By the time that the contract was being signed in 2019, there were significant concerns about the cost overruns and delivery. And we were being told at that point, no, no, no, there's a board in place and there are safeguards. That will ensure that this project is delivered. It should have cost a half a billion. It's going to cost at least one and a half billion. I mean, isn't it going to be, however wonderful it is, a monument to incompetence? I think the financial situation has been discussed at length and I've been on the record now. I've been very clear. I've been very critical of that for many years. In opposition, you were very critical. Yeah, in opposition and I'm happy to restate the position. I don't believe that the financial management of it was done properly. And I remember reading reports and kind of like gasping when the cost went over a billion euro. But I mean, what is the current estimated cost of this hospital? Yes. So we're at 2.2 billion at the moment. In the last 12 months, there was 500 million more allocators by the ex-checker to this hospital government saying, that's it. That's all the money. It's not getting any more. But nonetheless, it's impossible to say that that will be the final bill because there are so many disputes between the developer and the board in terms of changes, alterations, or adjustments to the plans for the hospital and how that has played out. And that's all in mediation and it is ultimately going to go through the courts. I want to talk about the politics of this because this has haunted multiple health ministries in T-Shig. Now, people who remember Lyovriker famously saying that short of a comet hitting Earth, this hospital will be opened by 2020, which obviously didn't happen. You had a column in the paper on Monday where you were pointing out that the minister who signed the contract for this hospital, who has tied the taxpayer to this ballooning, super-expensive project, was Simon Harris. The past number of weeks in this Europas, as we've seen again today, have been dominated by debate and discussion regarding the development of this major pediatric hospital. This hospital, as we all accept, is badly needed and will transform the delivery of children's healthcare in Ireland. It has been promised for decades. We will move from antiquated facilities to fit for purpose, single ensuite rooms for every child. Yeah, it's rather funny looking at Stephen Donnelly's letter. Dear T-Shig, well, you're kind of upgrading the guy who should know all about the cost overruns on this project about what exactly is going on because in December of 2018, Simon Harris brought a memo to Cabinet and got approval for the main contract for the hospital, so the allocation of the investment, whatever that price tag was at that time, that was signed off by government. This is right, proceed now, because all they've done at that stage was clear as such. So if there was any doubt at that stage about proceeding with the project, it could have been stopped, and you could just say, well, listen, we've just spent a lot of money clearing as such, but we haven't gone any further, so it was continuing on. And at that time, Simon Harris says, while I fully support this project, there is no doubt that the additional costs associated with the project are of great concern. So at that point, things were starting to ramp up. People were saying that it's going to cost enough a lot more. He says, and we must have assurance that phase B of the construction project will be delivered within budget and time scale. So that's the December 2018 that contract is signed in January 2019. What assurances did he get? Because here we are five years later, and we have his successor, Stephen Dunley, saying that the contract that was signed in specifically, he mentions January 2019 has got what he calls modest levers to ensure that the contractor has delivered the project on time and on budget, within most construction projects of this nature. And even what people do in their own house, there tends to be legal clauses within the contract that if the developer goes over time, that there will be a financial penalty. So that hasn't happened in this case. There tends to also be fixed pricing in terms of aspects of the contract. There tends to also be penalties that you can claim ceremony back from the developer if things start spiraling out of control. It puts the owners on the developer to figure out, this is what's going to cost. This is what I'm tendering you for, so that's going to be the finished price. What Stephen Dunley is saying is the board don't have the ability really to force the developer and at all here. So the question mark is, why did we not have those assurances in that contract that the person who is now the T-Shook was telling us that we were going to have at the time? If you're not, this is our money, it's two and a half billion euro. All the time that this is being delayed, you have sick children going into hospitals full of excellent staff, but that are substandard, that are cramped. The parking facilities are terrible. This is so important in terms of national health infrastructure and it's not being delivered on time and it's gone way over budget. Who are we supposed to be annoyed at or who is going to be accountable for this? The current Minister of Health is not the root of me, but I just inherited this mess. I've got a board in place there doing their best to get this project across the line, but that their hands are tied by a bad contract. The guy who was the Minister of Health at the time doesn't seem to be accepting responsibility for us. The guy who was Minister of Health before him is walking off into the sunset on the next general election. There was an interesting speech by John McGinnis to find a fall T.D. and former chair of the Dal Public Accounts Committee last week on the Apple money. What he didn't get into was this is what we should spend the Apple money on. What his point was, this is how we need to change our processes within the iructous to hold to account the expenditure of taxpayers' money, because his point was, this money can just be frittered away, there's 14 billion, you won't get much out of that if you don't watch how the pounds and the pennies are being spent. This is a prime example of that. This is not a bike shed up the back of Lentzer House. This is 2.2 billion, and what we are basically being told by the Minister concerned is the taxpayers getting held to ransom here, and what we're basically told by iructous committees are, is that they're not getting a whole lot of information. We've all read the polls in the newspapers over the past few weeks, and we can see that Finne Gayle is doing well, and there's a lot of analysis going into Simon Harris' performance, and this stroke they've pulled off where even though the guy's been in government forever, he looks like a new kind of change candidate. But his political legacy is tied to this project, and the public are really annoyed about it. Do you think there's any political danger here that this could come back on Simon Harris, or does he seem to manage to distance himself from it? Does the Scoliosis promises, does that come back on Simon Harris, does what's happening in UL, come back on Simon Harris, does the constant A&E problem, regenerate, come back on Simon Harris, does the level of an investment that has gone into health and clearly not delivered to return to reform, more so than anything else that was required. Does any of that ever come back on Simon Harris? Not really, no. He seems to be the new Teflon T-Shuck as well as the TikTok T-Shuck. And my thanks to Pionon Chien. I'm Ellen Coyne, and today's episode of The Indo Daily was produced by Dave Hanrichy, researched by Tessa and Janku, with sound designed by John Smith, Archive Clips from Ortee News, Virgin Media News and The Irish Independent. And if you enjoyed The Indo Daily, don't forget to follow and leave us a review.