Mater to pay €1.5m for Bohemian FC's car park

The Mater hospital in Dublin is to pay more than €1.5 million over the next four years to Bohemian Football Club to rent car-parking facilities for staff.

A hospital spokesman confirmed yesterday that it is to pay Bohemian Football Club Ltd €410,000 a year for 190 car-parking spaces at a facility near Dalymount Park on the northside of Dublin.

The spokesman said staff at the Mater paid about €500 a year towards the cost of a parking space.

The Mater currently has about 600 spaces at its surface car park on Eccles Street between the Mater and the Mater Private hospitals. The car-parking spaces rented from Bohemian will act as an overflow facility for the hospital.

The €410,000-per-annum deal with Bohemian was approved by the board of the Mater hospital a number of weeks ago. The board was told that the agreement between the Mater and Bohemian Football Club Ltd regarding the provision of car-parking facilities would run from January 2006 to the end of December 2009.

A hospital spokesman said the new deal was a renewal of an arrangement that had already been in place for a period.

The Mater hospital is currently examining five or six other sites in the vicinity to use as a main car park for staff in the years ahead.

Much of the existing 600-space car park on Eccles Street is earmarked as the site for the planned redevelopment of the hospital. New car-parking facilities for staff will be required for the duration of construction work.

A new A&E and outpatient departments as well as additional theatres and 100 new beds are to be provided as part of the Mater's redevelopment.

The facilities were originally to be provided as part of the project to build a new children's hospital on the campus to replace Temple Street.

However, the future of the plans were in some doubt for a time last year after the HSE ordered a review of the plans for a new paediatric hospital.

The Government has now decided that a 400-bed national children's hospital will be built at the Mater complex. The plans for facilities for adult patients at the Mater itself are also expected to go ahead separately.

Due to the changes to the scope of the project, it is expected that planning permission will have to be sought again.