Hopes that new hospital in Glanmire will be 'shovel-ready' before 2030

A planning application for the long-awaited Cork elective hospital has been lodged days after agreement was reached with landowners to allow for a new access road to be built.

Proposals for the facility were first announced in the 2018 National Development Plan.

In 2023, the Department of Health announced plans to locate the facility in the old St Stephen’s Hospital campus in Glanmire.

At the time, it was envisaged that construction would start in 2026 and be finished by 2027, but those plans fell by the wayside.

Concern that local road infrastructure would not be sufficient for either the construction phase or the completed hospital had in recent times proven a stumbling block.

However, that impediment was overcome last week [/url}when agreement was reached with local landowners, and a planning application has now been lodged with Cork City Council.

It is proposed that the new four-storey hospital will include nine day-case theatres, 10 minor operation rooms, and seven endoscopy suites, with a total floor area of 16,243sq m.

Once operational, the elective treatment centre will provide more than 68,500 patient procedures annually.

Access to the new hospital will be via a proposed new access road linking the R639 and the L2973.

Speaking to The Echo, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said he and local Fianna Fáil TD Pádraig O’Sullivan had been working with the city council and landowners to help resolve issues relating to the road infrastructure.

“A new elective care treatment centre will be transformative for the region and will take a lot of pressure off of the trauma centre, which is CUH [Cork University Hospital],” he said.

Mr Martin said he was hopeful that, “all going well”, there could be a planning decision as early as June next year.

“When I came into government in 2020, I was determined to get this off the ground.” he said.

“CUH is the major trauma hospital in the region, and so very often people had operations postponed and so on, so a need for an elective centre was always identified.

“It has never had the ring-fenced operating theatres and minor injury rooms because accidents and trauma always took over.

“Now, the surgical hub that we opened there last week is a very significant step forward, but the actual elective hospital in Glanmire will be a transformative moment.”

Mr Martin added that he believed the presence of the new hospital would help facilitate the expansion of Cork City’s northside.

“In Glanmire and Little Island, we’ve had huge population growth in all of that area, and so it’ll be very beneficial to that area,” he said.

Last year, Derek Tierney, who is now the secretary general at the Department of Health, said the plan was to have the Cork site “up to shovel-ready status” within five years by 2030.

Asked whether he hoped that would happen by 2030, the Taoiseach said he would like it done sooner.