David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

-----that we should prioritise this on the correspondence. My issue is that we had the Secretary General of the Department before us on this issue. We were dealing specifically with the processes and procedures around procurement and the spend of taxpayers' money in respect of the national children's hospital. We had to drag information out of the Department in respect of the cost overruns. From the €983 million to the €1.4 billion to the €1.7 billion, we spent the entire morning getting that information. We eventually got a breakdown, which we should have had before the meeting started. How in God's name did the Department not give us the Mazars report in advance of those witnesses coming in? To be fair to Mazars, its report nails many of the issues. It is a very good report. It outlines the 57% increase in costs as soon as the project started. In my view it is a damning indictment of the work of the design team and the implementation board. It is a damning indictment of the reporting relationship between the board and the Department. There was very poor oversight. We talk about reporting lines in respect of civil servants sitting on boards. The reporting lines between the board and the Department were very weak.

What we have now established from our work in the Committee of Public Accounts is that in April of 2018 the steering committee became aware of very significant cost overruns. The Department was not informed until August and the Cabinet and the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform was not informed until November. That is where we ended up but my point is that the Mazars report highlighted all of these weaknesses yet we were not given that report before the witnesses came in. We were given it afterwards. I believe that was disingenuous of the Department not to do that. We had to go looking for that and when we got it, we saw that it answers many of the questions we would have wanted to put to them. In my opinion it is a way of avoiding accountability because a report such as this one is done for a reason. It is to identify where weaknesses exist and our job is to probe those weaknesses to seek improvements. We are not here to do anything other than protect the taxpayer, make sure that if there are weaknesses in the system we can identify and highlight them and recommend changes and improvements. That is our purpose. We cannot do that if valuable and important documentation is not provided. I cannot understand why that report was not given to us. We got it on Monday with a mountain of other documentation that it is not possible for any member of this committee to go through. I made the David and Goliath comparison earlier. We are not the Goliath, and some people have their views about the Committee of Public Accounts. We are doing a very difficult job with the mountains of correspondence that we get, and we cannot keep up with all of it. I believe in this case it was a deliberate tactic by the Department not to give us that report because I think it would have been a very different meeting. That is my point. Do we come back to it?