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14th May 2025
09:42am BST

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.