THERE’S SOMETHING ALMOST metaphysically absurd about watching a nation construct a monument to its own institutional dysfunction while calling it progress.

Each morning, as I scroll through updates on Ireland’s National Children’s Hospital – the latest including the unfolding of a public row between the Minister for Health and the project’s contractor – I’m reminded of that peculiar academic phenomenon where a research project becomes so elaborate in its methodology that it loses sight of its original research question entirely.

The NCH saga reads like a case study in what happens when bureaucratic momentum encounters the gravitational pull of sunk costs, creating a kind of institutional point-of-no-return from which no rational decision can escape.

We’ve spent eight years and counting constructing what amounts to a very expensive lesson in how not to build things, though I suspect we’re too invested in the narrative to learn from our own cautionary tale.

Let me share some numbers that have been keeping me awake at night, not because they’re particularly shocking in isolation, but because of what they reveal about our collective capacity for self-deception.

In 2018, Dublin’s three tertiary children’s hospitals provided approximately 334 beds between them. The gleaming new National Children’s Hospital promises 380 inpatient rooms. This is a net increase of 46 beds, or roughly 14% more capacity. Forty-six beds. For context, that’s about one extra bed per €43 million spent, if we’re being generous with our math.

The critical care expansion is genuinely meaningful, from 32 to 60 beds, an 88% increase that addresses a real capacity crisis. Mental health services gain 20 new CAMHS beds, filling a void that has haunted Irish paediatric care for decades. However, we have noted we won’t have the staffing for CAMHS. I know these improvements matter, genuinely and substantially.

But here’s where the institutional amnesia kicks in. We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that marginal bed increases justify transformational spending. The hospital’s cost has metastasised from an original €650 million to at least €2.2 billion, a figure that continues to evolve with the same........

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