Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I reiterate it would have been preferable for Mr. Breslin to have the answer, but he does not.

I am wary about naming people as it is not always fair to do so. A person on the board is a staff member of the Office of Government Procurement, which is part of the Department of Finance. Was there a meeting between officials from the Department of Health, preferably the Minister, and this person who I would perceive as almost being the Government representative on the board and who certainly is there to oversee procurement, given the office in which he works?

How many meetings were there between departmental officials and this individual?

Much has been made of the two-step procurement process. Many people said not to compare this with building a house. I would not build a house using that process and do not think anyone in this room would either. In the case of a more complex project such as the hospital, it is possible that that process would not be selected if the decision were to be retaken. I presume the person to whom I refer was appointed to oversee some of the procurement. It is a competency-based board. The person's curriculum vitae indicates that his competency is in the area of public procurement and that is what he brings to a competency-based board. Did he report back to Mr. Breslin to keep him abreast of developments and to ensure he was well informed? Was that done via meetings or reports? How was the information communicated? We keep coming back to the same issue, namely, that a hands-off approach was adopted and the end result of that was the catastrophic overrun. All sorts of words are being used to describe it but we will use "catastrophic" for the moment.

On the financial statements for 2018, those for 2017 have been sent to the Committee of Public Accounts. Are the statements currently available? If not, when will they be available? I ask that they be circulated to members of this committee.