The world’s oldest continuously operating maternity hospital will stay where it has always been. Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill’s decision to abandon the decade-old plan to relocate the Rotunda to Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown is welcome and overdue. The case for keeping the hospital in the north inner city was compelling. What took so long to acknowledge it is another matter.
Nobody should underestimate the difficulty of upgrading a functioning hospital on a protected site at the heart of a Georgian square. The planning refusal last month of a ¤100 million critical care wing on heritage grounds illustrated the problem. Conservation concerns are legitimate. Parnell Square is among the earliest and finest of Dublin’s Georgian squares, and the encroachment of 20th-century hospital extensions has already compromised it considerably. But that must be set against the need to provide critical care facilities for newborns and their mothers.
It should not be beyond the capabilities of the State to establish a coherent policy that takes account of all these concerns simultaneously. So it is depressing that the opposite has been the case at Parnell Square, where two parallel public processes have proceeded for years under the respective arms of local and central government with remarkably little sign of coordination. Dublin City Council has been slowly, haltingly advancing plans for a cultural quarter anchored by a new city library. The Department of Health has been managing, or mismanaging, the question of the Rotunda’s future. Both projects display a too-familiar combination of inertia, incoherence and shifting political priorities.
A new integrated plan will need to tackle not just the hospital’s immediate clinical needs but also the accumulated embarrassments of the square itself: the ugly surface car parking that has colonised what were once pleasure gardens, the decaying fabric of protected Georgian buildings, the absence of any coherent public realm. These are not new problems. But experience suggests we will continue to wait for them to be addressed.
