National children’s hospital: Board tells politicians project is a ‘hostage’ in the €2.2bn controversy
https://www.irishtimes.com/health/2024/09/25/national-childrens-hospital-politicians-to-get-update-on-project-deemed-a-fiasco-by-sinn-fein/
Posted by Future-Object5762
11 Comments
Incompetence and corruption.
They do go hand in hand huh?
There will be an enquiry / tribunal / commission.
Lessons will be learned.
We will go again.
(But hey, at least we might get a nice children’s hospital out of it. Eventually.)
I watched the Committee earlier, would like to see BAM up now in front of the Health Committee to give their side of it. I thought yer man Gunning spoke quite well at it in fairness, has thrown a few well placed balls in their court but they should be given the opportunity to respond – the whole design changes still being the reason for ongoing delays when the design phase is finished seems very hard to stand over.
Once again despair at politicians in Oireachtas hearings – constantly pushing for yes/no answers that very clearly don’t exist, asking pointless questions that don’t even make sense, useless grandstanding commentary, pontificating, etc.
Roisin Shortall stayed until the very end to question Gunning on the expertise of the NPHDB and background of it’s members, when it’s all clearly available online. Maybe she just wanted it on the record of the Dáil but I’ve so little time for going over ground that’s in the public domain, waste of time and makes these things so unwieldy.
The project has been at the centre of so many committees at this stage, but it really feels like today’s session would have been better placed in front of PAC or Finance. It’s a health project but it’s still an infrastructure and construction issue & expenditure concern
All I keep thinking about, how bad is SF that they keep getting beat by this FF/FG govt?
These guys are the real victims here!
Trying to help the children of Ireland and they are being hauled over the coals!
I feel like I should preface this with the fact that I don’t work and have never worked for BAM or on the NCH project..
For all of BAMs many faults, they were set up to fail from the start by the HSE as the client for not ensuring a basic standard of design, the designers themselves and all of the design changes after the end of design phase.
BAM as the lead appointed party are essentially the middle man, they can (to an extent) only pass change orders from the client to the subcontractors and then the corresponding variation order/costs from the subcontractors back to the client.
They should be interrogating all of the costs as they come in, which from experience are often heavily inflated by the subcontractors (sometimes to the tune of up to 300% if you let them away with it or don’t pay close attention).
While they’re far from blameless, and it is their name all over the whole thing as LAP, they are actually being misrepresented over this whole thing.
2.5bn controversy… Did I say 2.7? No, it was definitely 2.9!
Having worked with BAM on projects in both the private sector and public, as a vendor, not directly . I know that BAM is not the problem.
It really disappointing as someone who grew up with heath issues as a child the overcrowding is crazy in the winter to the point where surgery and basic treatments are cancelled and it’s takes weeks/ months to be rescheduled and when they start building it’s back in 2011 it still not ready . I am 24 years old now its still not ready I feel like the whole thing was built with scammers it probably won’t open till 2028.
Are we surprised? People working in the civil service that do not care in the slightest. If they do care and this is their best work, they need to go…… quickly. I’m sure there are quality workers in the Civil Service but my God does news like this make my blood boil.