I thank all the witnesses for coming in this morning. I would like to go back to the hospital contract issue and to the Department. In planning for this project, I presume the Department would have looked at other projects internationally where new hospitals had been built. The Royal Manchester Children's Hospital, for instance, which has 371 beds, cost £504 million in 2004, which translates to approximately €680 million. A project in Ontario is costing Canadian $2.4 billion dollars, which is equivalent to €1.68 billion. The interesting thing about the Ontario project is that it has received approximately Canadian $1.3 billion dollars in donations from the public for building that hospital.

Our project was always going to be a huge one, with 6,151 rooms in the hospital. My understanding is that at any one time there will be approximately 140 outpatient clinics running. The building itself will be approximately the length of Grafton Street. When one then considers projects that went radically wrong in the past, for instance, the Dublin Port tunnel, where the project went from €250 million to €900 million, the Department must have been aware, in terms of dealing with any issue, that precise detail would have had to have been worked out at a very early stage. Were all those risks identified at an early stage?

When exactly were the various stages of contracts signed? For instance, the Department states that the tender came in at €637 million and we ended up in April at €983 million. Can we get an outline of the additional items which were added to the €637 million figure? I presume these are mechanical and electrical items. Do we have the exact figures on those so that we can make up the margin from €637 million to €983 million?

When exactly were the contracts for those various additional items signed? Were they all signed in December 2018 or at an earlier stage? Why did it take so long to work out the finite detail, which is about where everything would be located in each room? Planning permission was granted in April 2016. When the tenders were invited, a bill of quantities was prepared and sent out to all of those who were tendering for the project. I presume it was known at that stage that certain items were not included in that. When did the process of working out the finite detail start? If the second highest tender had been selected, would the other additional mechanical and electrical items still have worked out at the same price or would there have been a difference? There is a need for clarity on the move from €637 million to €983 million and on how everything progressed after that.