Any difficulties identified with the site allocated for the new national children's hospital in Dublin will have to be addressed, Minister for Children Brian Lenihan said yesterday.
Mr Lenihan was responding to a new report drawn up by the board of Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin, which called for a review of the decision to locate the new national children's hospital, into which Dublin's three existing children's hospitals will be merged, on the Mater hospital campus.
The board in its report for the Health Service Executive and the Department of Health said its main concerns related to the size/space of the site and accessibility to it.
The report, details of which were published in The Irish Times yesterday, urged the authorities to reconsider the possibility of building the new hospital on a greenfield site.
Asked about the new report, Mr Lenihan said: "Of course if there are difficulties about transport or access or the size of the site, that has to be addressed."
But he added that the Crumlin board's report said the new children's hospital should be co-located with a maternity hospital, and there was in fact a proposal to locate a maternity hospital "near the Mater site".
He made his comments to reporters while attending the publication of two new reports dealing with children's experiences in hospital and the right of children to be heard in healthcare settings.
Meanwhile, the Children in Hospital Ireland organisation has complained that while the new children's hospital will have a huge bearing on sick children for years to come, neither children nor their representatives were being consulted.
The organisation's spokeswoman, Mary O'Connor, said: "We feel there has to be a lot more dialogue with a lot more people. So far the amount of consultation about this new hospital is minimal with professionals and users."
Labour's health spokeswoman, Liz McManus, said the report from the Crumlin hospital board was hugely significant and the Government simply could not ignore it.
"The biggest children's hospital in the State has now raised very serious questions about the decision to locate at the Mater and major reservations about the plan have already been raised by Tallaght hospital," Ms McManus said.
"The circumstances in which the decision on the Mater was made were less than transparent and the process was seriously defective.
"One matter of serious concern is that the Taoiseach appears to have given a commitment that the hospital would be located in his own constituency prior to the decision-making process having been completed.
"It is now essential that the Government commissions an independent review of the decision to locate at the Mater that must take account of the serious reservations raised by Crumlin and Tallaght," she said.
Fine Gael MEP Gay Mitchell said that there was every reason now to hold an independent review of the decision to locate the new hospital on the Mater site.