Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I agree with the Chairman. We may gain some value by going into the detail of what further variations may be on the cards and what that looks like. There is the historical side of it between the design and the variations. What is left and how different is it? There is also the question of whether big structural changes might be linked to anything around the national maternity hospital. Mr. Peter Boylan has put out the idea that perhaps one of the ways to address the critical needs around the new national maternity hospital is to provide a service at the children's hospital for critical care so that babies requiring such care could be born in that setting and have their needs addressed, as an interim measure if there is a need to look at alternative models for a new national maternity hospital. All of those are things that we may have sight of, as well as design or other changes that may be required as we go.

For those of us who visited, it is obviously a fantastic site. It is a brilliant improvement on what is there at the moment. We have many reasonable questions and we need to drill down into them and look for a schedule of what is anticipated from now on. We do not want to look at that privately exactly, because we do not want to take the role of the committee into that space, but committee members could get better visibility on specifically what the challenges are and what it is likely to cost. We certainly need more information than we have now and I support all of the committee members who have made that suggestion.