Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I was hoping for something else from the Minister and Mr. Breslin today. We have heard from the board, the Department and the HSE. I have asked all of them whether they believed that what has happened is a catastrophic failure of management. All of them have said "no". They stated that they would do things exactly the same and that they do not consider the financial side of this project to be a failure. I acknowledge the Minister has referred to being deeply frustrated but I have not heard an admission that this is a gargantuan cock-up of epic proportions with massive negative knock-on effects on the healthcare system. I think the Irish people have been had. I think we have just been mugged to the tune of about €1 billion. The Government's own documentation states the tender bid accepted was for €637 million. That went up to €890 million, then €983 million and then €1.4 billion. By the way, there is also an additional €300 million on top of that. Mr. Breslin can come back in when I am done.

In the commercial world, any project manager who presented that to the ultimate client would be fired on the spot and his or her company dismissed. Nothing of that sort has happened here, however. Not a single sanction of any kind has been taken against anybody. It gets worse though. We have heard today that while it was clearly possible for the project costs to go up by €1 billion, it is impossible to bring those costs down. Mr. Breslin stated it is not really possible to bring the €1.4 billion down because, for example, the external fabric of the building might have to change, thereby leading to new planning. It is interesting that, when the €1 billion was being added in, the external fabric of the building clearly did not have to change because new planning was not required.

The only real defence I have heard is that the hospital is very important and it is going to be of a very high spec. I agree with both of those things. The most expensive hospital ever built anywhere in the world is the Karolinska University Hospital. It was built in Stockholm which is an incredibly expensive city and it was built to an incredibly high spec. It has oodles of operating theatres, MRI machines, single occupancy rooms and all of those things. It cost €1.6 million per bed-----