Mr. Phelim Devine:

There were two aspects to it. The first aspect was that a large part of the €15 million cost I talked about was for the prolongation. We have our design team for an extra two years. The numbers were mentioned and we are talking about 100 to 200 people. Those prolongation periods happened during the intense period between going to tender and then finalising the GMP. They had 200 people working on the job for an extra six months. When we get to this stage, which is all about the construction and implementation, there are probably over 100 people working for another year or year and a half on that. That is where most of the cost was generated. The timeline of the project has extended out for different reasons.

The second aspect was the €9.5 million cost. As a development board, taking our experience of the GMP and what is in the PricewaterhouseCoopers report, we strengthened certain aspects of the design team and the capability within that team. We decided, after looking at other large-scale projects internationally, that we needed additional people from the design team checking quality on site, more than we had allowed for in 2014. There was an impact there in that the building control regulations were only in their infancy in 2014 when we tendered the job. This is a highly complex project. There are 6,000 rooms, every one of which has medical services in it. We need to do a huge amount of assurance and checking to ensure our contractors complete the job and commission the hospital to the right standards so we hand over a fit-for-purpose hospital to Children's Health Ireland.