Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 6 February 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health

Quarterly Update on Health Issues: Discussion
Quarterly Update on Health Issues: Discussion

Photo of Bernard DurkanBernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will not put words in anybody's mouth. I will not exaggerate the claims. I will not start the estimate for the hospital at a lower base than has already been discussed in order to further inflate the degree of annoyance one might have at the new price. I believed weeks ago and I still believe that unless the specification and the bill of quantities are properly identified and assessed in the initial stages, it leaves the whole situation open to exaggeration, mistakes, allegations and levelling of blame on different people. I do not want to do that and I do not believe there is any value in that.

The word "preliminaries" should be removed from big contracts like this; it is lethal. The one thing that needs to be learned is it is not possible to achieve any degree of accuracy if working on preliminaries, estimates or guesstimates, which is really all they are. In a big contract such as this, taking place over three sites, there is a propensity for something going wrong or something slipping. That is what we heard referred to as noise in the system; I can understand what that might be. My supposition is that the degree of concern at that stage was not of a magnitude that would cause the matter to be brought to the attention of those higher up the ladder.

It comes back to the kernel of what was in the original tender documents, what was tendered for, the bill of costs, the specifications and if the two meet. Obviously they did not meet. The bill of costs was short or else the detailed specification was short. I do not know how anybody can assess a situation given those circumstances.

Deputy Jonathan O'Brien mentioned last week that it would be a great help to the committee, if we knew what was involved in the very beginning. Somebody somewhere must know what kind of hospital we were going to have. Was it to be a high-tech hospital or was it to be just walls, floors and ceilings, the same as traditional hospitals or whatever the case may be? That is fundamentally the debate we are having.

The debate we are having now can be detrimental to the quality of health service that we all want to provide in the future. That has been a characteristic of the debate on the health services for some time. This relates to GP services and hospital services. As a result, I think we are dumbing down the quality of the services to suit the particular location, which is very dangerous.

This is a very dangerous thing to do, and if we keep going on like this, we will not have the class of health service we expect and that we pay for, that is provided for by the taxpayer. I expect PricewaterhouseCoopers to get to the bottom of the matter. I expect that the cost will be revised in accordance with the actual specification and the actual bill of costs, which did not emerge until late in the day.

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