By TOM GILLESPIE

The Western Health Board has been given the green-light to proceed to stage 3 planning for phase 2 of the capital development at the Mayo General Hospital, Tourism and Trade Minister Enda Kenny has announced.

This, he said, would allow the £25 million project go to tender within the next two months and construction work would commence by the end of the year or early in 1998.

The project will include an orthopaedic unit capable of carrying out 1,000 operations and of assisting 1,400 new patients at out-patients departments annually. It will also involve a new accident and emergency department, ten isolation rooms, a ten bed special care baby unit and at least 74-extra in-patient beds.

There will be a new administration and medical records department as well as an information technology system for the complex. Better parking facilities will be incorporated in the design and there will be improved visitor amenities as well as an oratory.

The first phase of the hospital - out-patients and operating departments, an intensive care unit and increased ward accommodation -- was completed in 1989 at a cost of £11 million.

Minister Kenny said last night: "I announced the sanctioning of phase two last year and I brought down Health Minister Michael Noonan afterwards to confirm a multi annual budget was put in place in respect of Mayo General.

"We have now got permission to move onto the next stage which is detailed planning and I would expect that the hospital phase 2 plan can go for tended in mid-summer.

"This means that it (phase 2) has moved this far in about nine months when it took the previous case (phase 1) at least three years to move to the same stage."

Minister Kenny continued: "You are talking about the provision of hospital facilities and hospital care and state of the art equipment that will serve the people of the county here for the next 50 years.

"Work on the project should start in late 1997 or early in the spring of 1998.

"We do not know what will emerge in a very complex tender document so it could be later than that.

"But the budgeting is in place catering for it. Regardless of what happens this goes ahead and assuming that the tender process goes smoothly you could see work starting there by the end of this year but certainly by early 1998."

He said the architects have been working round the clock to get this through.