World of Politics with Harry McGee

The first lesson you learn about politics is that nothing stands still. Things change – sometimes slowly; often quickly. Unfortunately, it’s a lesson that we all tend to forget.

When Sinn Féin took a bit of a bruising in the June elections, there was an assumption that there were goners for the general election. That’s a risky presumption to make.

As we have seen before parties that look like beaten dockets can often make a miraculous recovery in the final furlong. Sinn Féin did it in 2020. I don’t think they will do it to the same degree in 2024 – but they are in a better place now than they were after the local and European elections.

It’s the old Donald Rumsfeld thing about the unknown knowns, and the unknown unknowns. Something can always crop up out of the blue that can have a determining impact on an election.

Like, for example, there’s nothing like a wanton waste of public money to rile the public – and there’s nothing worse than the public service (and that includes the wasteful HSE) spending other people’s money in the millions and billions like it is going out of fashion.

And that goes for our public inquiries too. Some of them have become scandals in themselves because of the huge amounts of money that have been spent on them, and the purgatorial long time they have taken to complete.

In Ireland, on any major project, the time span between approval and final delivery is purgatorial long, a decade or more for major projects, a lifetime for some others. By the time the Dart Underground projects (the Metro) in Dublin is finally delivered I suspect will also be taking a long rest underground!

Take the National Children’s Hospital.

It was firstly meant to go to the Mater and, of course, the planning procedure took forever and then it was turned down. Then after a big lobbying campaign it was moved to the St James site (because of its proximity to a tertiary hospital complex) despite real misgivings about the suitability of a very tight city centre site.

It’s now almost a decade since the site was chosen. The original cost was going to be around €700 million. Leo Varadkar came to be haunted by his prediction that the National Children’s Hospital would be completed by 2020 ‘short of a meteorite hitting the planet’.

Well, metaphorically, that is what happened.

The project to build a state-of-the-art flagship hospital has become a saga, and an outrageously expensive one.

By 2019, the cost had gone up to €1.7 billion and now its current estimate is €2.25 billion. It’s also two and a half years behind schedule and likely to be 2026 before it opens for its first patients.

Pictured: David Gunning, chief officer of the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board at the Oireachtas committee on Wednesday.