Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister referenced cost reduction opportunities. This was one of the biggest disappointments of the report for me. In 128 pages only two pages were given over to that issue, and one of those pages was mainly a pie chart. I do not accept PwC's findings on this. It is strong in some areas but it is very weak here. It is essentially saying that 85% of the total cost is already contracted and therefore nothing can be done about that. As anyone who has ever built a wall, an extension, a house or a large building will know, as costs escalate he or she can sit down with the developer, builder, project manager, architect or someone else and say that the costs are getting out of control, and that despite there being a contract in place to build a particular item it has to be reigned back in. PwC has said, in the project involving the biggest capital spend in the history of the State, that this cannot be done. BAM stated that it would walk away. I understand that it is more than open to looking at the contract with a view to pulling costs out of this value engineering project. The shape of the building makes it as expensive to build as one could possibly imagine. It is shaped like a big glass donut, and there is a reason why none of us lives in glass donut-shaped houses; they are extraordinarily expensive and do not represent a very good use of space. Does the Minister accept the assertion that because 85% of the cost has been contracted- critically, the money has not spent and could be reversed from an engineering perspective - that we therefore have to let all of these potential cost savings slide?