AN all-Ireland children's heart surgery service will be fully established in Dublin by 2018 following a £42 million investment.
A children's heart surgery unit was set up at Our Lady's Children's Hospital in Dublin in March last year following an agreement between then health ministers, the DUP's Jim Wells and his southern counterpart Leo Varadkar in 2014.
But some patients still have to travel to England to receive vital surgery, including more than 125 in the last year alone.
Children's heart surgery services at Belfast's Royal Victoria Hospital stopped in 2015.
The funding was revealed yesterday at the opening of a new hybrid cardiac catheterisation laboratory at Our Lady's Children's Hospital, Dublin.
Speaking at the opening of the new laboratory at the Dublin children's hospital, the island's two health ministers, Sinn Féin's Michelle O'Neill and Fine Gael's Simon Harris, said the £42m would be invested over the next five years.
The investment also includes £1m to enhance facilities in Belfast.
Ms O'Neill MLA said children across Ireland will soon be able to have "their surgery within a reasonable travelling distance from their homes, and with their pre and post operative care being delivered in Belfast".
"The Congenital Heart Disease Network is a great initiative that benefits all of Ireland," she said.
Mr Harris said: "This unique collaboration is the first formally established all-island Network for clinical care and I look forward to working with Minister O'Neill and her Department to identify further opportunities for collaboration into the future, so that patients – children and adults alike – can benefit it from safe, high quality services with equally high quality outcomes".
Sarah Quinlan, chief executive of the Children's Heartbeat Trust welcomed the investment and said children with congenital heart disease had faced an "uncertain future" for the last four years.
She also called for the Clark Clinic at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children to be developed as a "paediatric cardiology centre of excellence".
"Today may go down as a milestone in the development and delivery of an all-island paediatric cardiac surgical network, but only if commitments made are delivered upon," she said.
