Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

When one has a procurement that ends up in protracted litigation, that certainly is a bad outcome. It is an expensive outcome for all sides and it is not something that anybody wants. When that happens, it is important to examine, carry out an inquiry and find out what is the cause of that. I guess that is why the report on the children's hospital was commissioned to see how things could be done differently. I do not want to comment on that particular case but the Chairman has extended it to the more general case.

When people end up in litigation when they are in a contract with each other, it often comes down to a failure to disambiguate the terms at the start of the process and to make sure that people are not at cross purposes over what services or goods will be delivered and when, and that the contract is fully disambiguated as well. I guess there is a learning for the Government and there is a learning for State agencies, and there is a learning as well for people who are bidding for contracts, in that.

The Chairman asked me what has been done to avoid that. The commercial skills academy is an important part of that. It is important that the specification of our projects in future is carefully done. We have a number of new structures that have been put in place in the past couple of years to monitor very large procurement projects. It has been a particular interest of the Minister, Deputy Michael McGrath, to make sure that the very large projects that are included in the national development plan have monitoring processes in place to keep track of those projects and to make sure they are on track and that they do not drift off and move into protracted litigation.