Building the children’s hospital at St James’s is madness… There is a better plan

There’s a real stench coming from the St James’s site, selected for the new children’s hospital. It is not from the giant Drimnagh sewer running beneath it but the scandal that’s erupting around its runaway costs, chronic car parking facilities and deadly access.

It leads directly to the door of aspirant taoiseach Dr Leo Varadkar who, as minister for health, rubber-stamped the second attempt to build the national children’s hospital in that medieval Dublin location.

His predecessor James Reilly already squandered over €40m of taxpayers’ money trying to build it on another site, the Mater Hospital campus.

Planning was refused in 2012 on the grounds that it was aesthetically incompatible with the Phibsboro site.

It’s a pity the planning authority has no mandate to consider medical risk, cost or alternative locations.

On all these grounds, there can be only one winner for children – the 150-acre greenfield site at Blanchardstown, off the M50, where Connolly Hospital is located.

At one stage, Dr Varadkar seemed to agree.

In 2012, he offered land at the Abbottstown campus to facilitate the Connolly bid for the new hospital.

As a doctor, he knows full well that babies are born in maternity hospitals and that the stress put on ‘co-locating near an adult hospital’ was a fake argument for the St James’s site.

He also knows that the medical case for getting very sick babies at risk of death and severe brain damage to hospital as quickly as possible ought to have been a game changer.

He’s certainly been told. In September 2014, acclaimed child oncologist Fin Breatnach said putting the children’s hospital on the St James’s site would be a mistake.

He laid out the enormous risk to sick children trapped in transit getting to a hospital in the bowels of a traffic-congested city. The minister for health and man-who-would-be-taoiseach responded with a one-line letter. The message was clear – he was not for turning.

Pat Kenny’s Newstalk show broadcast a test run from Ardclough in Co. Kildare to St James’s hospital by Jack McNiffe, a sick child who was driven there by his mother Aisling. The 25km car journey took 80 minutes, a speed of around 20kph – slower than a push bike.

Jack, now 10, was looked after in his early years by the Jack & Jill Foundation, whose campaign to move the project from the St James’s site garnered more than 60,000 signatures and was handed in to Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s office last year.

In the Dáil, independent TD Mattie McGrath has been challenging the Government to comment on a final tally of €1bn – a figure supported by leaks from bidders – for the new hospital at the St James’s site.

This puts the cost per bed at over €2m each – a price that could put the national children’s hospital in the Guinness Book Of Records as the world’s most expensive hospital ever built.

Why should you be concerned? In the currency of primary care units, consider the overspend, which is already running into hundreds of millions of euro.

Bank of Ireland estimates the cost of a primary care centre for your community at between €3.5m and €7m.

Let’s be honest, we are all scared of the battlefield conditions in local A&Es, despite the heroic efforts of medical staff.

The overspend at the St James’s development would help ground most of the entire national requirement for primary care centres with lots to spare – that’s why it’s important to your community that this project is located elsewhere.

The Finns, whose economy and property prices are similar to Ireland, are building a highspec hospital with 412 beds on a greenfield site.

That’s close in scale and bed numbers to our national children’s hospital, with its 473 beds. But the build cost is €300m – about €500m with its high-spec finish – and it will be ready to take patients in 2020.

That works out at €1.2m per bed for Finnish taxpayers and over €2m per bed for us.

Two years ago, with Jack & Jill founder Jonathan Irwin, I attended the launch of the plans for St James’s at Farmleigh House where Alder Hey, a new children’s hospital in Liverpool, was revealed as the reference site.

But the 270-bed Alder Hey, built for €270m in 2015, is on the large grounds of an old house.

That site is a carbon copy of Connolly, situated off the M50, because it is adjacent to Liverpool motorways and transport links, and is highly accessible to the region. The greenfield Connolly site is big enough to take both the new children’s hospital and a new maternity hospital at a fraction of the cost of the St James’s development – and without ripping off families with sick children for privatised parking because of a chronic shortage of spaces.

Parking matters. About 90% of families will access the children’s hospital by car to compete with 3,500 staff for just 1,000 spaces, a ratio of car spaces to beds of a little over two.

Now consider squeezing in the proposed new maternity hospital at St James’s as well, and the access goes from chronic to impossible.

Alder Hey’s car space-to-bed ratio is nearly four. The figure for Toronto’s SickKids hospital is four and a half, and for the Children’s Hospital of Chicago it is nearly seven and a half.

Each underground car space at St James will cost at least €35,000, compared with €9,000 for a semi-basement space and just €2,000 for surface at Connolly. Then factor in the cost of repositioning the Drimnagh sewer and underground spaces will cost over €100,000 each – of your money.

Recently, I attended the launch by President Michael D Higgins of Justin Keating’s book of notes Nothing Is Written In Stone. Keating stood up for Irish natural resources as a Labour minister in the 1970s. He was an ex-communist, vet, journalist, broadcaster and humanist, who was not afraid to change his beliefs in light of new evidence.

Early in 2010, at age 79, Justin Keating went to his grave in a cardboard coffin, in his own words, lightly holding his beliefs, still reworking his paradigm. It’s not too late. Both the children’s hospital and a new maternity hospital can be built at Connolly for a fraction of the cost of developing the St James’s site, in less time and at less risk to very sick children.

The Cabinet has yet to sign off on the runaway budget for which there has been no cost benefit analysis.

Who among our elected representatives has fibre similar to Justin Keating, to stand up for families and their sick children, and to call a halt to this madness?