The National Maternity Hospital will reach 10 times original cost

New figures show that the National Maternity Hospital will estimate a cost of €2 billion to develop

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.