Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

On the children's hospital, we wrote a detailed letter last week to the new national paediatric hospital development board and to the Secretary General of the Department of Health who was involved in the planning before the board was established. We asked for a detailed response on the assumptions used in the costs. I am conscious that the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health has also called them to appear before that committee in the next couple of weeks. We will have a very specific examination of their accounts. We will probably have to wait for at least a month until they appear before the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health. We do not want to duplicate its work in a fortnight. They are on our list, but the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Health will deal with them first. That committee will probably ask broader questions, but we will have very specific questions.

On 23 March, we will have the Department of Education and Skills and the Higher Education Authority in the afternoon. The reason for this is we have said we want to have a series of meetings with the third level institutions and we are pencilling in 30 March and 6 April. We will try to get through a number of universities on one day and the institutes of technology on the other day. I want to confine it to three meetings because if we go to four or five meetings on third level education we will never get the others up. We have to condense it into a maximum of three meetings even though it is a big area. Members can see what we are trying to do. The secretariat is trying to line up the slots for the different groups.