It will be the end of May before the Health Service Executive can enter legally binding contracts with developers to build private hospitals on the grounds of public hospitals, it was confirmed yesterday.
This could mean the contracts are not awarded until after the general election and all Opposition parties have said if they are in power after the election they will scrap the Government's plan to locate private hospitals on eight public hospital sites.
Tom Finn, director of the co-location project with the HSE, said yesterday that tenders for the construction of the hospitals would be issued next week after a special HSE board meeting.
He said developers who have been bidding for the sites will then have 28 days to tender, meaning tenders would have to be returned by about May 14th. Then the HSE will evaluate each bid against agreed criteria, which will take about two weeks.
"That will yield a decision and sites will then be awarded. Sites would be expected to be awarded by the end of May," Mr Finn said. Originally, sites were to be awarded next week.
The private hospitals are due to be built at the Mid-Western Hospital in Limerick; Waterford Regional Hospital; Cork University Hospital; Sligo General Hospital; and St James's Hospital, Beaumont Hospital, Blanchardstown and Tallaght hospitals in Dublin.
Mr Finn dismissed as untrue reports on Newstalk yesterday that four of the co-located hospitals would not be going ahead. "At this point there are still eight sites actively involved in the process," he insisted.
Six of the sites were ready to go to tender and two - those at Sligo general and Connolly hospital - had "a couple of minor details to be resolved" which he expected would be sorted to allow them also go to tender in the coming days.
The hospitals are being built on foot of a plan by Minister for Health Mary Harney to free up 1,000 beds in public hospitals for public patients by having the private patients normally accommodated in them moved to the adjacent private facilities when they are built.
In response to claims that the HSE chief executive Prof Brendan Drumm was not in favour of the plan, Mr Finn said he had encountered no lack of interest on the part of Prof Drumm in the project. He also claimed the fact that outside consultants were now auditing the overall scheme was normal in a project this size.
Fine Gael said the entire plan was "flawed" while Labour and Sinn Féin called again last night for it to be abandoned.