Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 9 February 2021

Public Accounts Committee

National Paediatric Hospital Development Board: 2019 Financial Statement

1:00 pm

Mr. David Gunning:

I will try to answer that. The contract is relatively clear on this particular issue. In the event that there is a Government-mandated closedown, our view, or the view in the contract, is that for every day of that closedown, the contractor can get an extension of time. It was seven weeks for the Government-mandated shutdown, and that seven weeks can be extended onto the contract completion date to give a new contract completion date which does not attract penalties or anything like that for the contractor. For the time that the contractor remained closed, in our view, there certainly can be no compensation or no reward for the contractor's behaviour at that particular time. There was no reason the contractor should not have been back on-site and working at that particular time. There are a number of Covid claims within the claims we have talked about and they will be dealt with in the course of the process that is set out in the contract for dealing with these claims.

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