24-06-2025
Cabinet to approve name of €2.4bn National Children's Hospital Ireland
The plain title for the hospital is due before Cabinet today.
The hope is that construction will be finished in late September and it could be opened around this time next year.
There has been debate around who it should be named after with suggestions around doctors and nurses in the past who have made a contribution to medicine here.
The naming of the hospital is a milestone and will bring the prospect of a final finish to its construction a step nearer.
In April, Sinn Féin spokesperson for Gaeilge, Gaeltacht and Arts, Deputy Aengus Ó Snodaigh, submitted a Bill for introduction to the Dáil which would name the new national children's hospital after Dr Kathleen Lynn, one of Ireland's foremost pioneering medics who founded Ireland's first hospital for infants, and the only woman commandant of the 1916 Rising.
The Bill was co-sponsored by Ó Snodaigh's constituency colleague Máire Devine TD, Rose Conway-Walsh TD who is Sinn Féin's TD for Dr Lynn's home county of Mayo, and party health spokesperson, David Cullinane TD.
Teachta Ó Snodaigh said: 'As people across Ireland use the opportunity of Easter to remember the sacrifice and heroism of Irish republicans before, during and after the 1916 Rising, this Bill offers a concrete way of honouring the memory of one of the most inspirational and too-often ignored of those heroes.
'The Killala-born Church of Ireland woman forged a trailblazing career in male-dominated medicine, as GP in Rathmines from 1904 and the first female resident of Dublin's Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital. The suffragette also helped out at soup kitchens during the 1913 Lock-Out, taught first-aid to Cumann na mBan and was Chief Medical Officer of the Irish Citizen Army, becoming the most senior ranking woman in the 1916 Rising when she took over command of the republicans at City Hall,' said Mr Ó Snodaigh.
'In the period after the Rising, she was arrested, spent time in prisons in Ireland and England, went on the run, was captured, and was let out of prison because her medical skills were in such need during the Spanish Flu epidemic. Dr. Lynn was Vice President of Sinn Féin in 1917, served as an elected councillor in Rathmines for ten years, and was elected as an anti-Treaty Sinn Féin TD in 1923.
'With all that going on, it is truly incredible that Dr Lynn along with Madeleine ffrench-Mullen and others established Teach Naomh Ultáin (St Ultan's Hospital) as the first hospital for infants in Ireland, and the only hospital entirely managed by women, in 1919. This hospital played a pivotal role eradicating TB in Ireland by introducing the BCG vaccine. The hospital also pioneered Montessori child education.
'There is widespread support for naming the hospital in Dr Lynn's honour, including an Uplift petition of almost 6,000 people, the backing of trade unions SIPTU and Fórsa, as well as historians Diarmaid Ferriter, Dr Mary McAuliffe, Dr Martin Mansergh, ophthalmologist Dr Tim Horgan, and Prof Mary Horgan, the first woman President of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland.
'Both An Taoiseach, Micheál Martin TD, and the Minister for Health, Jennifer Carroll MacNeill TD, have responded positively to the proposal previously, saying respectively that Dr Lynn was 'a very worthy choice' and that there was 'nothing not to like' about her,' he said.
