IT IS AN exciting time to live in the Irish capital. Dublin is changing right before our very eyes. 

Naturally enough, you’d expect this column to spend roughly one thousand words obsessing over the proposal to erect a 35-metre-tall homunculus in Dublin’s Docklands, but fortunately, that’s already been taken care of. And at the end of the day, The Giant still seems sort of unlikely to happen, so this week let’s focus for now on some of the city’s developments that are locked in, final, and opening very, very soon.

Where to begin? Ah, of course. With the National Children’s Hospital! Oh, I’m sorry, I’m just getting word from my producers… What’s that? ‘Not even close’, you say? Well, I’ll be damned. 

It was confirmed this week that the National Children’s Hospital still isn’t open and, in a stunning climbdown, there are actually no longer any plans in place for it to open at all. I mean sure, it might open one day. I’m just saying they’ve got nothing planned. 

Having been assured that the hospital would be functional by 2022, then 2023, then 2024, of course 2025 and eventually 2026, the latest news on the children’s hospital is that developers BAM have no idea when it will open. It’s sort of like the TFI real-time app, only instead of a bus to take a few dozen people a few dozen miles, it’s a hospital to help thousands of sick children. 

February 2025 is when health minister Jennifer Carroll McNeil told us that the project was “98%-99% complete”, a phrase obviously calculated to give the impression that all that was left to do was straighten the letters on the sign above the door. In actual fact, Carroll McNeil said that this estimate came from BAM themselves. So if you’re wondering who the buck stops........

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