The Rotunda Hospital – via its governors and guardians – became the owner of Dublin’s Parnell Square (it still owns the Ambassador and the Gate Theatre, which are rented out) in 1757 when it was granted the land, by royal charter, by King George II, whose title was King of Great Britain, France and Ireland. While much has changed in the intervening 269 years, the Rotunda continues to fulfil its original mission, caring for Dublin’s pregnant women and their infants. The hospital is due to deliver its one millionth baby during 2027, and is the oldest continually operating maternity hospital in the world. This makes the Rotunda unique. It is the busiest maternity unit in Ireland.
The Rotunda is governed by a board of governors/guardians (directors) who provide unpaid advice and supervision to the executive management team running the hospital on a daily basis. Occupying the same city centre site for so many years comes with buildings that have been adapted over the decades, but are inadequate for the modern care of the 8,000 to 9,000 mothers and babies annually. Our published annual results show that we provide care as safe as any maternity unit worldwide while constrained by a beautiful but old building.
Thirty years ago, the board of the hospital considered moving to a general hospital site (Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown). The plan at the time was to improve the facilities for mothers and babies, and to care for the small number of mothers who become sick during or after childbirth, requiring urgent transfer for medical care – usually to the adjacent Mater hospital. However, more recently the board of the hospital have decided that moving from its historic site at the north end of Dublin’s pre-eminent street is unwise and unnecessary. We felt that improving the on-site facilities for mothers and babies was a more practical and realistic option than moving the hospital in its entirety. There are good reasons for this.
Firstly, there is no longer a medical imperative to move as the medical care for sick mothers has ceased to be an issue. Over the past 30 years the hospital’s anaesthetic staff have become intensive care specialists, allowing sick mothers to be cared for and stabilised on site before an orderly, unrushed, transfer to an adult hospital.
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Secondly, it simply seemed wrong to abandon the Parnell Square site after so many years as a successful maternity hospital in a building with a rich history.
Thirdly, the Rotunda enriches the north inner city with the annual footfall of thousands of pregnant women, their partners and extended family not to mention hospital staff.
Recently, the Rotunda has expanded its city centre footprint, with HSE and Dublin City Council support, and acquired buildings in Cavendish row, North Earl Street and Dominick Street. North Earl Street is an accessible state-of-the-art outpatient facility for mothers and babies, with Dominick Street being developed as a hub for gynaecology services in north Dublin.
The final reason is that the Rotunda is a unique and happy place to work with everybody making an extra effort to make this venerable institution function in today’s world. (The Rotunda hospital canteen serves the best hospital food I personally have experienced and it is one of the cleanest hospitals I have ever visited.) But no amount of efforts by the staff can surmount the infrastructural deficit.
Consequently, over the past 10 years, plans were painstakingly drawn up, in conjunction with the Department of Health/Children, the HSE and Dublin City Council, to build improved facilities, including a badly needed new neonatal intensive care unit, and modern en suite accommodation for mothers and babies on site. The revised plans were approved by Dublin City Council on July 31st, 2025.
It is hard to overstate the devastation felt by all of us when planning permission for a €100 million, 10,000sq m extension was refused on appeal by An Coimisiún Pleanála on February 9th, 2026.
I personally get upset seeing 24 young mothers and their babies sharing two open-plan wards, with three bathrooms at the end of a long corridor when they should have one-, two- or four-bed en suite rooms. In our modern prosperous forward looking country, expectant mothers deserve no less.
Imagine also how parents with babies in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit will feel knowing an opportunity to remedy the grossly overcrowded conditions in which their vulnerable infants are cared for – a potential breeding ground for infection – was rejected. The neonatal intensive care unit is so overcrowded that critically ill infants, or high risk pregnant mothers, regularly have to be transported to another site for care.
Planning permission was originally granted by Dublin City Council in late July 2025, but was appealed to An Coimisiún Pleanála by two third parties, one the Dublin Civic Trust, an architectural conservation society, and the other a nearby resident.
The plans were overturned because of the effect on the visual streetscape of Parnell Square West, which is now designated a heritage site. The appeals board disagreed with its own inspector and said the proposed development did not represent “an overwhelming public benefit sufficient to justify the degree of heritage harm identified”.
This would be ironic if the development were not so urgently needed – Parnell Square West currently comprises a slightly down at heel terrace of Georgian houses, hundreds of double decker buses daily and a single storey flat roof extension on the Rotunda side. This is not an attractive vista.
Ireland is a prosperous functioning democracy in which we all accept some restrictions and curbs for the common good.
However, when an infrastructure project that is clearly in the interest of the majority, and approved by the Department of Health, the HSE and Dublin City Council, can be derailed in the interest of preserving an unattractive streetscape on the dilapidated Parnell Square, it’s hard to see this as a “functioning democracy”.
Professor Tom Matthews is chairman of the Rotunda Board of Governors
