Mr. Paul Quinn:

Dual tendering was looked at and remains a rarely deployed mechanism for delivery of projects in the Irish public sector.

We are aware that the children's hospital and the works in Cork, at Dunkettle, were approached through that mechanism, but it is an unusual mechanism to be used in an Irish public sector context. To say that two-stage tendering in and of itself is necessarily a bad approach would be incorrect and that there may be circumstances in which it does need to be used. It may be really difficult to ascertain the full cost without doing certain works in advance, or certain designs.