Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has said she “will be considering everything” with regard to options for the Rotunda Hospital.
Carroll MacNeill was responding to a decision by An Coimisiún Pleanála to reject plans for a €100 million extension of the Rotunda Hospital intended to care for critically ill women and infants. It decided the four-storey critical care building would cause irreparable damage to the character of Parnell Square.
Planning permission was originally granted by Dublin City Council in late July 2025, but was appealed to An Coimisiún Pleanála by two third parties.
Speaking on RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland, the Minister said the extension for the Rotunda was a critical piece of infrastructure and she was very disappointed about the decision by An Coimisiún Pleanála.
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Carroll MacNeill said she would be meeting the master of the Rotunda in two weeks to consider their options. When asked whether she would support a judicial review, she said “I will be considering everything”.
However, a judicial review could take “a very long time”, and this was one of the faults of the planning system, she said.
Speaking on RTÉ’s This Week last weekend, the master of the Rotunda, Prof Sean Daly said he believed the Rotunda hospital “should stay where it is”. In 2015, the Government announced it was putting in place a plan for the Rotunda to relocate to Connolly Hospital. However, Daly said he did not believe “it will ever happen”.
Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald has described the decision by An Coimisiún Pleanála as “very disappointing and very alarming.”
Speaking on RTÉ’s Today with David McCullagh show, McDonald, who represents the constituency in which the Rotunda hospital is located, said the hospital provided excellent care in difficult circumstances, but it had been the victim of a lack of investment by successive governments.
There should never have been a decision in 2015 to co-locate the Rotunda with Connolly hospital in Blanchardstown, she added.
The proposal for a specialist neonatal intensive care unit was an extremely sensitive service that “desperately” needed investment. “The Rotunda needs to be invested in.”
McDonald said she was now seeking clarity that the Rotunda would remain in the inner city and would continue to provide an important service for women and their babies.
McDonald said she accepted the bona fides of those concerned with the Georgian fabric of the city, but Parnell Square needed to be “liveable” and it needed to serve the needs of Dubliners “here and now”.
Graham Hickey, the CEO of the Dublin Civic Trust has described the controversy as “a sorry mess”.
Hickey told RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland that the staff of the Rotunda Hospital had been left figuratively and literally “holding the baby” over the planned extension which was incompatible with Parnell Square, which had an “extraordinary landscape”.
“This is a de facto replacement for the existing Rotunda Hospital. What is being proposed is a building that is larger than the entire campus of the existing Rotunda Hospital,” he said.
“In fact, this is a six-level building, if one includes the plant storey up on the roof. And out of those six levels, a single floor is allocated to the intensive care requirements for premature babies and vulnerable babies. The rest of this building is in all but name a standard maternity hospital.”
Hickey said that Parnell Square was a “conservation area” in terms of planning parlance. “So, by any European standard, this is an internationally important civic place in our collective imagination,” he said.
The current controversy was the result of failures by successive governments and the Department of Health to properly plan for the co-location of the Rotunda with a Level 4 acute hospital, he added.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin told the Dáil there is no other short to medium-term prospect “other than the critical wing being established on this site” at the Rotunda Hospital.
He was responding to Opposition leaders who blamed the planning decision in part on confusion over Government policy on co-location.
Social Democrats leader Holly Cairns said the Government should admit its strategy on co-location contributed to An Coimisiún Pleanála’s “completely mad” decision.
Cairns said there will now be a “massive delay in this extension happening no matter what and the Government now needs to at least take responsibility for that and admit it was the Government’s strategy that misled an Coimisiún Pleanála into making this decision.”
