Editor

The latest on St. James’s

The Cabinet was mislead in its decision about location both on clinical grounds and on decanting/access/cost grounds.

  • No mention in the Dolphin report of requirement for the following which are now planned :-

1)New  Entire Campus  Energy Plant – on 3rd level below the 2 levels of car parking.

2)New entrance ( which will end on the lower level of the children’s carpark) to the campus at Mt. Brown. This requires removing most of the hill between O’Reilly Ave. and Cameron Sq. This entrance will carry all service and delivery vehicles for the Entire  St. James’s Campus as well as acting as a second entrance /exit for the children’s hospital carpark.

3)To facilitate Service deliveries, part of the second level of children’s car parking will be taken as the  Deliveries  Area for the entire campus, compromising further the woefully inadequate car spaces for children and causing more trouble for residents on surrounding roads.

4)To facilitate the new Mt. Brown entrance, ware houses at  St. James’s are being demolished and storage warehouses are being leased ‘in Crumlin’. This leased depot will in the future be the collection point from which service vehicles will daily ferry goods for the Entire St. James’s campus via the Mt.Brown entrance.

5)The Drimnagh sewers ,which run through the proposed area for the underground carpark, require to be rerouted. Cost €18million??

6) The footprint of the children’s hospital has extended onto the expansion space proposed in  St. James’s submission  to the Doplhin Review to be reserved. Expansion space is now a joke, being restricted, we are informed at the Family Forum at the NPHDB offices, to what is currently, and grandly, named the ‘Meadow Gardens’ at the north end of the building. Goodbye dear Meadow Gardens.

  • Local residents rightly fear subsidence, overshadowing, further sewerage problems, noise, loss of privacy, and a significant escalation in their already difficult access and parking problems.
  •  Businesses in Inchicore are very concerned about increased traffic congestion on Mt. Brown and the Old Kilmainham road.
  • And what about the cost of the satellite units?
  • And what about the Maternity Hospital? Where and when?. Minister Reilly’s and Minister Varadkar’s “ultimately”  is horrifying.

We could go on and on. Could someone in our parliament please act responsibly and stop this gross abuse of taxpayers’ money and abuse of children right now. Go, together with the Rotunda Maternity hospita,l  to the 143 acres at Connolly Hospital. We are in the 21st century.