Mr. Jim Breslin:

The use of the word "board" may be confusing. In retrospect, it may be that we should not have used it. It is very important to understand that the development board, which is the statutory body being asked to design, build, furnish and equip the hospital, has remained in place throughout the process. It is a competency-based board and has expertise within it, including property and construction professionals among its staff. It has appointed a design team which includes some of the largest firms nationally or internationally with the expertise to undertake what is essentially a professional task to develop a design, procure against it and implement it. The important point is that structures above that are not about designing the hospital or procuring it, they are about a number of separate things.

One of those things is the oversight of how the board is delivering on the project against its budget. The second thing, which is just as important, is that on the day the hospital opens, a number of things have to converge. The hospital must have been built and equipped, which is where we are now, but also other important things must happen too. We have created Children's Health Ireland to bring together the three constituent hospitals to ensure services move over to the new hospital in a seamless fashion. The third thing is that we must have an electronic health record and ICT capacity delivered into the hospital. The first matter, which is the building of the hospital, is the job of the development board. The second matter of the moving over of services is the responsibility of Children's Health Ireland. The third matter, namely the development of an electronic health record, which will be the electronic health record for the rest of the hospital system, is the responsibility of the HSE. An important function and part of the reason those structures were put in place in 2017 is to ensure all of those things happen in the right order and complete according to the right timescale. There is an element of the governance which is about integrating different work streams, only one of which is building the hospital.

The other question the Deputy asked was around the design team. The figures we have supplied to the committee today are, obviously, an estimate and a budget. The estimated proportion of the increase of €450 million that is towards the design team is shown at No. 6 in the table on page 3. Of the total there of €53 million, €28 million involves design team costs.