Billion Dollar Baby: How Ireland Built its National Children's Hospital - at any cost

Paul Cullen

Billion Dollar Baby: How Ireland Built its National Children's Hospital - at any cost

€18.99 €22.49 RRP
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SKU: 9781399755894

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Release Date: 08-10-2026
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It was meant to be a symbol of how far Ireland had come - a world-class national children's hospital that would finally honour the promise of the nation's founders to cherish all its children equally. Instead, it became a cautionary tale of ambition gone awry.
In Billion Dollar Baby, veteran journalist Paul Cullen delivers the definitive account of Ireland's most expensive and controversial public project. From its conception in the 1990s to its still-delayed opening more than three decades later, Cullen exposes the tangled web of political interference, medical rivalries, flawed planning and spiralling costs that turned a €650 million vision into a €3 billion fiasco.
With insider access and forensic detail, he explores how vested interests derailed progress, how tendering missteps and design flaws inflated the budget, and how secrecy and inertia kept the project alive long after common sense had fled. Alongside the children's hospital saga, he explores Ireland's wider struggle with mega-projects - from failed IT systems to phantom metros - and asks: what does this say about how we govern, spend, and care?
Gripping, infuriating and essential, Billion Dollar Baby is a landmark investigation into the politics of healthcare, the cost of delay, and the price of promises unkept.