Minister for Health Mary Harney insisted that there had been adequate consultation in choosing the Mater hospital site as the location for a new children's hospital.
She said that the paediatric community had been consulted after the publication of consultants McKinsey's review and was enthusiastic about its findings.
"Difficulties arose with some members of the paediatric community when the site was chosen. It is inevitable that some people will be upset when one hospital must be chosen from among several.
"I understand that people have preferred locations. What is important, however, is that for the first time we will have a world-class tertiary facility for sick children, collated with an adult teaching hospital and, subsequently, a maternity hospital that will deal with high-risk pregnancies." This, said Ms Harney, would be a major step forward in the treatment of sick children and would be welcomed by the vast majority of people, notwithstanding the reservations of some that a particular site was chosen in preference to others.
Ms Harney was replying to John Gormley (Green Party, Dublin South East) who had asked if the paediatric community had been excluded, as Dr Pat Doherty, chairman of the medical board of Crumlin hospital, had stated in an article in The Irish Times.
Labour spokeswoman Liz McManus said that the goodwill present at the start of the process had evaporated and that the Government's decision to locate the hospital on the Mater site had now effectively been rubbished by a Crumlin hospital report.
"Its chairman pointed out, in an article in The Irish Times today, that there is now a real fear that care will be compromised and fragmented," she said.
Ms Harney said if it was a matter of political expediency, the Government would continue building a new hospital in Crumlin and another in Temple Street.
McKinsey had examined 17 of the top tertiary children's hospitals in the world, on which basis it recommended a 380-bed hospital in the context of Irish demography.
