Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

We are back to something here that we have talked about on numerous occasions, namely, process. Having a fixed-price contract and nailing down all of the details of what we are going to build in advance is how we avoid overruns. It is not just about conciliation, it is about how these extra costs occur in the first instance. What was the nature of the tender? Why are we not opting for fixed-price tendering that provides certainty? Why are we not anticipating within the specification just exactly what it should contain in advance? We were through this with the national children's hospital about add-ons and that is where the extra costs and overruns occur. How this occurred would be a question for this committee in terms of how it was tendered. We are now at a point where there has to be conciliation but it is clear there is going to be an overrun. Can we see what we can find out about it? What was the nature of the tender and why were the issues that generated this cost not contained in the original tender document?