Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Yes, that is correct. I do not want to name them here. Even though we have privilege, I am conscious the board will have to consider all of these matters. We depend on professional expertise to give accurate, factual information. We hire such firms because we do not have the expertise ourselves. We can then scrutinise them and bring in other people and other experts to look at that information again. It was clear in respect of the national children's hospital project that the business case was not just flung on my desk and I brought it to Government the next week. It went through a very deliberative and intense process.

It now appears, however, that some of the information we were given appears to have been fundamentally wrong. When this issue was at its height, I heard the Taoiseach ask if this was a case of taxpayers' money being wasted or was it that the project was always going to cost more and we were given the wrong figures. The PwC report has largely come down on the latter view. It found that there was not a massive waste of taxpayers' money. There was, however, a significant error in calculating an accurate cost. That is astonishing when we depend on such experts.