John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for attending. I met some of them when we visited the site. I was very struck by it and had long and interesting conversations with Mr. Gunning and the project manager. I get the uniqueness of the site. For members of the public who might be watching, I was very struck by the fact that, if I interpreted it correctly, if this was a house-building project, normally a contractor has all the space around the house in which to work and the rest of it. However, this project has the footprint of the hospital and everything has to take place within it because everything else is built around it. That imposes additional costs. I understand that it is a pretty unique project. I am aware that it is a cutting edge project, not just from a medical and children's health perspective, but from an architectural perspective. I am also aware that it is so unique and cutting edge that it is being visited and international inquiries are coming in about the development of it. These are all very positive things. We await the completion of the hospital.

In layman's terms, and I am not trying to belittle this, I could not help thinking of Dermot Bannon who presents "Room to Improve". Every time he revisits a site there is an additional expense and the quantity surveyor is tearing his or her hair out. We are trying to account for taxpayers' money to some degree. What is the difference between this process and a much more minor process in trying to quantify how much this project will cost in the end? What kind of processes are there to determine that and to determine the impact of things like inflation on it? These are the kind of normal things that come into any building project. Someone sits down and says that inflation will severely impact this. At some stage, we will know what the final bill is.

The witnesses must have some sense of what the final bill will be, with some of the things coming in. If they were to quantify it, and let us get it out now, can they give us even a ballpark figure? I ask for this is in part because, like many infrastructural projects that get to a certain stage, the public resigns itself to some degree to overrun costs when it begins to see a project materialise. It happened with the Luas, the Dublin Port tunnel and terminal 2 at Dublin Airport. People then say, "This is almost here. We just have to get on with it." Do we have a ballpark or some kind of figure that we can land on regarding the overall cost?