New figures show that the National Maternity Hospital will estimate a cost of €2 billion to develop
In 2023, former Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly, received cabinet approval for the National Maternity Hospital to go to tender.
The development costs were first proposed to cost €150 million. However, it is now estimated to cost from at least €1.5 to €2 billion, as per The Sun.
TD Pádraig Rice issued a statement about the concerning costs:
“The National Maternity Hospital cannot become another runaway train – its development has been mishandled by successive health ministers, including Tánaiste Simon Harris, and continues to spiral out of control.
“The hospital has been mired in controversy since the beginning – all these years later, we still don’t know why the State is building a valuable public hospital just to hand it over to a private entity.”
“Now we learn that a project that was estimated to cost between €500 million and €1 billion by the Department of Public Expenditure could cost €2 billion – an astronomical sum for a facility that the State won’t even own the land that it’s built on.”
“When it was first proposed, the project was estimated to cost around €150 million – had it been delivered on time, and in a more suitable location, costs would never have gotten so out of control.
“The Minister for Health needs to get a handle on this project now – we cannot have a repeat of the New Children’s Hospital.”
This follows the controversy over the National Children’s Hospital, which was first estimated to cost €650 million and would be completed by 2020.
Now, the National Children’s Hospital is estimated to cost €2.24 billion and will open in 2026, according to Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, who spoke on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland in February 2025.
