Mr. Robert Watt:

It is a good question. The way to look at this would be in two stages. There would be the first stage, up until when the Government approves the project, and then we would go out for design and procurement. There is the period from then until there are shovels in the ground. There are two stages. Mr. Tierney will have a view about how quickly it can be done. If it was a project costing over €100 million, where it was clearly established by the Department and the HSE and at a political level that it was absolutely needed and there was a case for it, then, if we fast-tracked all of the different things, namely, doing a business case and going through the various reviews of that, we might be able to get it down to six to nine months. We would then go the process of procurement and planning.

Mr. Tierney spoke earlier about the derogations that we used during Covid in relation to procurement and planning. It is very difficult to sustain an argument that those derogations should apply now that we are in normal times, even though the case could be made that the particular infrastructure is urgent and its absence is causing pain and delays in treatment and so on. Maybe it is something that we need, as a State, to look at. It is quite instructive and we have learned a lot, particularly on bringing the electives to where they are now, with ourselves and our colleagues in the HSE, in terms of how quickly we can do this. We need to make it faster and then we need to manage the next stages. Mr. Tierney has further information on codes but it is about trying to shorten the process when there is an urgent need. As you can imagine, from our perspective as officials speaking to this committee or speaking to the Minister, we get a very frosty reception when we say we need to develop something but it is going to take us three or four years to build it. That is not met with a happy response. I will ask Mr. Tierney to give some sense of whether the timelines are realistic or whether we can do better.