Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

-----and it is super high spec. I understand Chair. At €1.6 million per bed, the national children's hospital, building at the same cost as the most expensive hospital ever built with a super high spec, would be €750 million. The costs can be triangulated in all sorts of ways and we still keep coming back to a figure of about €1 billion.

Turning to my questions, the Department found out about this in August and PwC is not going to report until March. Do the witnesses think a period of seven months from finding out about this to getting the report is reasonable? When was the PwC report commissioned? Was a Mazars report not commissioned previously? How is the PwC report different from that? Can the committee be provided with the Mazars report? When did the Mazars report come to the Department? Is the Department of Health not capable of finding out what went wrong? This committee certainly has some pretty reasonable ideas about what did go wrong. For my final question, I want to go back to the PwC report. I am happy to stand corrected but I believe the Minister stated PwC will be looking at ways to reduce the €1.4 billion. My understanding is that is not in the terms of reference and that PwC is an accountancy firm. The value engineering, redesign and technical appraisals needed to look at reverse engineering out some of those costs require engineers, architects and specialists-----