Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

We have looked at that, or rather Children's Health Ireland has, as has the HSE, and they have shared it with the Department. There is a programme of trying to put through a number of service plans so that both the staffing and the other ancillary costs are known. By the time the hospital opens, the biggest single driver of the overall scale will be the number of beds and the fact that it is almost fully, if not entirely single bedded, with a capacity for an individual parent or family member to stay in most rooms. I am not sure of the details. The rooms are big and the site covers a big area. We are trying to make the hospital as efficient as possible. The chair of CHI would be better able to respond, but a lot of work is going on to try to make sure, for example, that it has a logistics system that does not require the hospital to have its own big store, which would take up a lot of space, but that it is serviced by one of our centralised distribution hubs. Yes, is the answer.

We can come back with the information or one of my colleagues can set out what is known to date about that. A lot of work has been done on what it would cost to run the hospital itself. The hospital will only work if it fits within an overall model of paediatric care for Ireland, which must also be marshalled. The biggest part of Ms Hardiman's role is to be ready to bring the hospital live and then fit it into the overall construct of paediatric care in Ireland. Her role is not to build the hospital. There are costings for those bids, well beyond what the actual building construction and equipment terms cost. Attention has turned to the revenue cost of operating the hospital, even though it is years from opening. Estimates are available for that.