Mr. John Pollock:

The last time we met we discussed the fact that the development board had been given a new remit to concentrate on the design, building and equipping of the hospital. Previously, it had had a dual remit. It had to concentrate on delivering the building and the medical-clinical integration of three children's hospitals. The Government decided to have two boards - our board, that is, the development board, and the group board, which is chaired by Jim Browne from NUI Galway. The skillsets in our board relate very much to building. The chairman has 30 years experience in the construction sector. We have two urban planners who worked with local authorities, one of whom was a member of An Bord Pleanála. The Chief Government Procurement Officer is on our board because, given the amount of procurement work we have to do, we also have a lot of financial work to do. We have an architect who is the chief architect in the Northern Ireland health service.

The next thing was to make sure the executive was put in place. Again, my background is in engineering. I have worked on health care and building projects for 30 years. The other members of my team, from the commercial director to our design director, come with engineering and architectural backgrounds; therefore, we know what it takes to deliver a building.

Having these two streams in place, we said the next thing to do was to get in place a world-class design team with experience in designing children's hospitals. We said we would not accept a design team with no experience of designing a children's hospital. BDP Architects is leading it. It delivered Alder Hey Children's Hospital and the Royal Alexandra Children's Hospital in Brighton in the United Kingdom. During the procurement phase the board was making sure we could minimise risk. When St. James's Hospital was originally proposed as the site of the national children's hospital, a smaller site was offered. I think we discussed this issue the last time we met. The site comprises 12 acres of land in the middle of Dublin and three times the size of the site proposed at the Mater Hospital.