Chances of it coming in at 600 million are 50/50

Sloppy Journalism, 300m was for a green field site.

650m is the probable cost. The current NMH site will be sold to help pay for the new NMH.

ST NEWS: Directors of new company that will take over ownership of St Vincent’s campus in Dublin, where the National Maternity Hospital is to be relocated, will be obliged to uphold the “values and vision” of Mary Aikenhead, founder of the Religious Sisters of Charity

Apply the usual formula for major government projects: take the initial estimate, double it, now double it again. Add the number you first thought of. Add the cost of the Commission of Inquiry. Borrow it all at negative interest rates!

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/ ... -1.3730712

That comes to almost 3 Million Euro per bed. I blame the nuns! All those lay professionals are working pro bono - who would want to profit from sick children

This just exposes, again, the stupidity of procyclical spending.

Blame the nuns all you like, but truth is the real culprit is computers, humongous timewasting by executives fiddling around with Excel and Powerpoint to make their presentations look slick, HOURS spent aligning and shaping stuff and testing it out in different colours and then their figures being entirely ignored by the boss and colleagues who have also wasted HOURS refining their presentations, we taxpayers should be donning our yellow vests NOW against such corporate timewasting but nobody is there spanking them and ordering them to GET ON WITH IT NOW.
The original budget can be slashed by half if Minister Harris instead of pleading for more money tells the project you're getting less and you'll still deliver on time and you'll achieve this by throwing out your computers and your timewasting software, and that's not a request that's an order, but he won't do it which is why he looks so worried.

i totally agree, its like having mccreevy in office at the moment. The time to do these projects was 2011 /2012

The Minister doesn't deny the €1,400,000,000 figure, he doesn't even pretend that he wants value for money. His only aim is to get "world class care" so money is no object. Music to the ears of all the contractors and the Minister knows no-one in the Oireachtas or the media will object to this bonfire of taxpayers money so long as we all believe it is in a good cause.

https://www.rte.ie/cspodcasts/media.mp3 ... 4_232_.mp3
He isn't pressed on this because neither the interviewer or the Minister considers it incongruous that their most pressing concern is to turn New Years Day into Abortion in Ireland Day.

Contrast that with the GAA's response to a possible €24,000,000 cost overrun at Páirc Uí Chaoimh:
https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingn ... 92095.html

Even now, the entire cost of this massive project is just loose change for the National Maternity Hospital but the GAA believes in corporate governance: Croke Park is taking the project away from the Cork County Board.

Hard to believe it cost just £1,700,000 to build the original stadium in the 1980s - allowing for inflation, that's only about €4,860,000 in today's money.
Interest payments back then totalled £900,000. Amazing the value for money you can get when money is costly.

The scoping, planning, and construction of any piece of infrastructure in Ireland takes about ten years - much longer than any economic cycle!

The troika were actually extremely relaxed about the composition of spending once deficit targets were being hit.

They would not have objected if the government had said: "We're going to build a metro in Dublin but cut pensions/raise VAT to 25% to pay for it"