Dr. Fergal Lynch:

The Minister has given a commitment to have it done by the end of the year. We will do our very best to produce it by then. It is a very challenging timetable because of the nature of the work involved, but we are working intensively on it at the moment.

To answer Deputy Byrne's questions about the current board of the national children's hospital, the Minister appointed an interim board to make sure that work continued on the project. The current members are officials of the Department of Health and the HSE: I chair it, my colleague Bairbre Nic Aonghusa is assistant secretary general at the Department with responsibility for finance, and my other colleagues, Mr. Charlie Hardy and Ms Fionnuala Duffy, are principal officers in the acute hospital services, Mr. Jim Curran is director of estates in the HSE and Mr. Gerry O'Dwyer is a regional director of operations in the HSE. We will be replaced by a new board with the necessary technical, financial and planning expertise shortly, when the Minister decides on that. We are working as hard as we can to move things on as much as we possibly can. For example, we had a useful engagement with Dublin City Council earlier this week to begin the planning application and we are working intensively to move that project forward as quickly as we possibly can.