Mr. David Gunning:

We are absolutely committed to delivering on our purpose, which is to design, build and equip this hospital and hand it over to Children's Health Ireland, CHI, so it can provide services to the sick children of Ireland. We have a contract with the contractor. The actions we can take are prescribed and set out in that. It is critical that we get this compliant programme from the contractor. We are deploying the mechanism within the contract to do that, which is the withholding of 15% of all payments. In parallel with that we are engaged in dialogue with the contractor, bringing the contract issue towards a conclusion. That is a crucial point. Once we get that clarified, we will be in a position to make some significant progress in arriving at a much better picture of the projected cost outturn. Obviously, cost and time are very closely tied on any project, but even more so on this project.

Defending the claims is really important. As I mentioned, there is more than €200 million in claims. We have put a significant amount of effort into this area. In the time I have been on the job, which is just over a year, we have really turned up and I think we are doing quite a good job in that area. However, I cannot give any absolute guarantees that we will not face some challenges there because I am sure we will. These are the primary issues we are progressing. At the same time one of my jobs is to work closely with stakeholders to ensure that stakeholders, like Eilísh Hardiman and the team at CHI, are fully up to speed on where we are with the project and ensuring we have high levels of co-operation on the areas that are interdependent, which are around commissioning and service activation and moving forward. Those are the issues on my action list.