Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Mr. Pollock will be aware of the legitimate public anxiety about expenditure on consultants. We need to return to this issue because I am taken aback by the scale of the impairment.

We will move on to the here and now. I have a couple of questions on the report the board forwarded to the committee and the current status of the project. The report states that following approval of the project brief, the design team was appointed and design development is now under way. We are informed that the international architects, BDP, have been appointed to design the new children's hospital and that, in addition to these architects, seven other disciplines on the design team have been or are being procured in separate processes. These include quantity surveying, mechanical and electrical engineering, civil and structural engineering, project supervision, the design process, planning, traffic consultancy and fire safety. We are informed that seven of the eight design teams are in place, the exception being the fire safety consultants, for which the procurement process has not been completed.

On BDP, the architects, what process applied to the appointment of this company and what was the scale of the contract for which it tendered?