BAM profile: The building firm at centre of latest National Children’s Hospital controversy

The company that now trades as BAM Contractors, the firm’s main Irish operating vehicle, was founded in 1993 as Ascon (Building). It was rebranded in 2008 as BAM, part of a rebranding move to have all its operating companies under one name.

Also in 1993, what would become the tortured project of building a new, single tertiary children’s hospital was first proposed by the Royal College of Physicians.

In the intervening 30 years, both have had their ups and downs. The National Children’s Hospital has become perhaps the most notorious example of Ireland’s inability to control public works spending on major infrastructure projects, alongside the Luas and Dublin Port Tunnel.

BAM soldiered through the recession, noting in its 2011 accounts that it had another “difficult” year. However, as the economy improved, BAM surfed the wave, and just two years later it was gloating about how government-backed work was “beginning to bring construction projects to the market”.

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The company has engaged in deals with the State or State-linked firms for schools, courthouses, roads, tunnels, medical facilities and even sewerage schemes. It is unlikely the firm was imagining a project such as the children’s hospital, for which it won the contract in August 2017.

Almost since work began, the project has been dogged by acrimony over enormous cost overruns, culminating in 2019 when a report by consultants PwC pointed to underestimates on the cost of building the project and a series of weaknesses in the planning, budget oversight and execution of the project. The firm has a reputation for being cutting edge but also hard-nosed when negotiating.

‘Rumours’

BAM is owned by Royal BAM Group, a Dutch construction behemoth which had revenues of €6.6 billion in 2022. But such is the scale of the farrago at the children’s hospital that it has even featured on analyst calls with financial firms that track the group’s overall performance.

As the PwC report hit the headlines in 2019, senior executives at the parent company were asked about “rumours about the children’s hospital in Dublin, that the project is sizing up to be larger than initially anticipated”.

A BAM executive said there was “publicity in the market” and a “perception that [there] is an uncontrolled cost overrun” – something he rejected.

Since that low point, relations have hardly improved with rows over disputed cost claims that now run to more than €500 million. There have been legal cases and, of course, the destabilising impact of the Covid pandemic and hyperinflation in the construction sector associated with the war in Ukraine – and for good measure, a spate of arson attacks on the project site.

Just this year, the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board said BAM had not provided an updated programme for completion of the contract, despite repeated requests. It has told BAM that it intends to withhold 15 per cent of payments due to the company as a result.