Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 7 March 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach

National Children's Hospital: Discussion with Department of Public Expenditure and Reform

Mr. Robert Watt:

As I have said repeatedly throughout the day, there is a variety of issues. There are clear issues that we have learned from. My sense of the governance structure is clear enough. The national children's hospital board was established to deliver this hospital and it is full of people with significant expertise. The authority was the Department of Health. There was a role for the contracts committee but that was very clear in respect of the roles of the board of the national children's hospital and the Department of Health. A variety of issues are being aired about how this project has been managed. We need to ensure that does not happen again. I do not wish to be discordant or disagree with the Chair, but it is not true to state this does not happen in the private sector. It happens all the time in the private sector. We do not hear about it and somebody involved does not spend nine hours in one day in front of Dáil committees talking about it.

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