Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I will make just one point on the new national children's hospital and it relates to taxation. I heard the point made by Deputy Eamon Ryan on the overrun. There is no doubt that construction inflation would have been factored into costs. Every project has construction inflation factored into it. Inflation has exceeded what was expected. Will the Minister outline what rate of inflation was factored in for the project and what has materialised?

On upgrades or enhancements to the hospital project, all of those would have been sanctioned at a point in time. One cannot decide to build a road and then turn it into a dual carriageway without having sanction from the Department. None of this explains this whopper of an overrun - €500 million - that just materialised because these increases would have had to be factored in and those estimates of the additional inflation would have been known. If I am building a four bedroom house and I decide to make it an eight bedroom house, I will factor in the costs at that point. It is not as if I would decide to turn it into an eight bedroom house and the cost will be the same. I do not understand how this overrun happened.

A number of major projects are due to be rolled out in the next few years. I have a clear view that the Minister was asleep at the wheel on this and took a hands-off approach. The fact that the Minister for Health did not even bother to lift the phone or speak to the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform in the corridor to say the national children's hospital had bust the bank and was running €500 million over budget or did not have his officials inform the Minister's officials in a routine meeting is bizarre stuff. It shows complete incompetence at Government level and alaissez-faireattitude to the public purse and spending. It is clear that the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform was not over this issue and was not keeping a running look at what was happening, given that so many people in his Department and other Departments were aware of this and he was kept completely in the dark.

How can the Minister satisfy this committee that this will not happen with other projects and that there are robust procedures in place for projects such as MetroLink and we will not see another overrun of a couple of hundred million euro in a couple of months or years? We had come out of this type of approach taken in the old Fianna Fáil era, no harm to it, in terms of the back of the envelope stuff. This was all supposed to be a thing of the past and a relic of our history. This is why the International Monetary Fund, IMF, suggested that the Minister have a tracking monitor within his Department to monitor capital projects. It is why there are robust rules in place for reporting to Cabinet on projects costing more than €100 million. The Minister was completely asleep. How can he instil any confidence in us that he has got to grips with this issue? It appears the Cabinet is dysfunctional. I am sure the Minister and the Minister for Health, Deputy Harris, talk. I am sure they chat and meet each other in the corridor, at Cabinet meetings and at different events. Did the Minister for Health raise the issue with the Minister personally after the Minister's officials were told by the Minister for Health's officials and then contacted the Minister? Did they ever have a conversation about this issue? It is bizarre that there has been such an overrun and the two Ministers responsible did not have a conversation to relay that information directly, but allowed their officials to bring it up in a routine meeting.