In the end, having hunted for Moby Dick from one end of the oceans to the other, Captain Ahab went down with the Whale. Since Hermann Melville wrote the book in 1851, the chase for the White Whale has been an enduring metaphor for obsessive folly and mania – a determination to accomplish a relatively unimportant goal, regardless of the cost.
At some point in the last decade, Irish politicians decided in their usual cross-party consensual wisdom that the new National Children’s Hospital was absolutely vital. Children’s Hospitals are, of course, politically dangerous to oppose: Who dares stand in the way of an Irish politician in full flight about the absolutely essential job of providing world-class care to sick and ailing children? Once such an idea was mooted, almost all considerations about the wisdom of it went out the window.
In the end, if it is ever completed, Ireland’s national childrens’ hospital will be – by some distance – the most expensive public health building constructed in all of human history. Its cost will have run, per the latest estimates provided to the Oireachtas yesterday, to two thousand, five hundred million euros. The equivalent of winning the largest euromillions jackpot once a fortnight for a whole year.
It has never once – to my knowledge – been publicly debated whether a sum of money on that scale, invested in upgrading the existing facilities in the existing children’s hospitals might have achieved more bang for the taxpayer’s buck. Not to mention better and faster outcomes for the aforementioned sick children who are waiting years, in some cases, for treatments even as billions are poured into the hospital.
As is so often the case in Ireland, the fiasco around the children’s hospital is not the Government’s fault alone. Effective and courageous opposition might not have stopped it, but it might at least have made those in power stop and think. What’s more, those who opposed the construction then might be rather better placed to take political advantage of the disaster now.
The staggering length and scale of this project needs to be remembered, to be fully appreciated. A National Children’s Hospital was first proposed in – I’m not kidding here – 1993. Thirty years ago. It has been an objective of every Government ever since, over a time period in which at least three generations of children have come, and moved on, without it.
Planning permission was granted in 2016. The original estimated cost of the project – from 2014 – was €800m, which was presented as a deliberate over-estimate, and a worst case scenario. The initial completion date for the project was August 2022. The costs are now more than three times the original worst case scenario, and the earliest possible completion date is now late 2025.
It is, of course, too late to turn back now. Such is the nature of these things: Had they reconsidered the initial plans and simply invested €800m in alternative services for sick children, there would still be the option to build a hospital later. Now that the costs have ballooned, and so much treasure has already been expended, there’s no turning back. In order to prevent a bigger scandal, they have to suck it up and pay every single extra euro that’s needed to haul the whale ashore.
Because politicians are incentivised to do so, the focus of the scandalous cost is targeted at things other than the political process: Yesterday on social media, for example, there were plenty of dark mutterings about the contractors involved, and politicians will swear blind to you that civil service incompetence is at the root of the matter. The truth is that once again in Ireland, this mess is a result of a collective failure of political courage. It is a failure of our consensus-based politics.
One of the strengths of a tribal society – which Ireland very much remains – is a unity of purpose and determination when things are deemed to be in the national interest. But that same unity of purpose is also a critical weakness, as we saw during Covid 19 when it transformed into a collective determination to “do our bit” and go along with a lockdown designed to stop the spread: The result was that everyone got covid anyway, and billions were spent supporting damaged businesses.
In the case of the Children’s Hospital, billions are being spent in the hope of providing future care while in the current world, the waiting list for kids with Scoliosis is a scandalous five years. Nobody dared oppose it because in a tribal society, nobody dares be the one speak out against the popular thing. As it is, in Ireland, the result has been that we have spent billions on bricks and mortar to improve children’s health tomorrow, while leaving sick children underfunded today.
There are those in Ireland who, for whatever reason, want the state involved in more big construction projects – like housing. If the National Children’s Hospital taught those people a lesson, it might actually be worth the money.
But it will not. Because the obsession with it, from the beginning, was never rational. Like Captain Ahab, Irish politicians developed a demented obsession with a giant, shiny, white whale. It would be just if they shared his fate.