Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Was none of those reasons, including clinical standards, anticipated? Hospitals are built all over the world all of the time. I am sure that this hospital will be best practice - it would want to be at this price - but surely many of those reasons should have been anticipated by the quantity surveyors and architects, officials in the Department of Health or people involved in the project team. I do not expect the Minister, with two Departments to run, to look over plans and go through everything on a line-by-line basis, but were there not processes in place that could have anticipated these developments before someone even said the project would cost €650 million? Perhaps if these figures were examined earlier, the project might have gone to a different site. I am not saying it should do so, particularly at this stage, but perhaps someone would have said that €2 billion was far too much and suggested doing something else in a different way on a greenfield site where building would not have to be done in an inner city, built-up area. Why was some of this not anticipated?