Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Several issues have been discussed here. The first is the secondment. It is accepted that the situation was not handled in the best way possible but that, of course, is hindsight. I would challenge some of the views expressed on this basis. Dr. Tony Holohan was in situat a very difficult time for the country, the HSE and his family during which he was beset by all the issues, had to deal with everything that came before him and had to plan for the future. It was assumed that something would be done to try to retain him in the service. In those circumstances it is very difficult to have a smooth transition in the kind of complicated transfer that was envisaged at the time. There has been a suggestion that money was spent. That was not said by anybody here but it is implied that money was spent and money could possibly be lost and so on. Nothing was lost; no money was spent. However, this had to be done in a certain way. If the transfer, the secondment, were to take place, it would have to be on the basis of the availability of the necessary funding from the particular quarter whence it was going to come. That is usual in business and in Departments in order that you do not get to a situation where somebody is halfway across the river or the bridge and is told, "Sorry, that did not work out the way we had intended, so you will have to turn back or swim back." Some of the criticism is unfair, and it is criticism. It is a question of opinions being expressed as to how we would all deal with the situation. I might deal with it differently, the Chairman might deal with it differently and someone else might deal with it differently. Suffice it to say that, at the end of the day, no money was lost or if moneys were lost, I ask the Minister to tell us and let us know about it rather than letting us go around in circles for the next two or three years talking about it. I accept the report, and the ideal situation did not prevail, but notwithstanding that no money was lost and no commitment was given beyond the point of no return.

The other issue I want to comment on is the ongoing comment on the children's hospital. The Minister was prone to making the odd comment too when he was in a different capacity and, therefore, I remind him and everybody else that it is easy to criticise big projects in particular and to say a project is in the wrong place. I was in the Dáil recently when four different locations were put forward for where the children's hospital should be. The fact of the matter is that it is where it has gone and nobody is going to rip it up now and take it back down and start somewhere else in one of four or five different locations around the country. If we are really serious about the need to provide state-of-the-art care for children in the way it was and is intended, it has to go ahead.

The next issue we have to discuss is the cost, the so-called overrun and the scandals. I hear people talking about the scandals associated with the hospital. We should be very careful about that. That kind of thing could end us up in court at some stage. The scandals were because somebody decided matters before quantity surveyors had anything to do with it. I was a member of another committee at that time and followed through right at the beginning. There were no quantity surveyors' reports at all when a price was given to the effect of €600 million, €700 million and so on. It could have been €200 million or €100 million because there were no statistics available as regards the scale, the cost, stage 1, stage 2 and so on. One thing should be remembered: if it had been starting again now and there were not the two stages in the contract like there were at the time, it would cost very much more. There would be a really serious problem then. We hear references all the time to the overrun. There was no overrun because the overrun depends on the starting price, which was based on no information at all - zilch - so I cannot understand why we keep going on about it and going back again and again. This will be talked about in 20 years and it has the effect of debilitating the whole concept of the hospital, which is necessary, and everybody believes it is necessary. We have heard lots of propaganda disguised as facts.

The last point I will make is this. This is a big project. It has not shifted a whole deal from the time of the quantity surveyor's report in terms of cost. In all contracts over the same period there has been a certain slide one way or the other.

The important thing is that we continue with the project. We should not drag this down on some technicality, especially if we do not have the proper facts associated with it. This is the case, whether we be Ministers or Deputies in the Opposition. I am not criticising the Minister doing this now, because he has been a good operative in this area since he changed over from Opposition to Government. This is something that affects everybody from time to time. We can assume that all the things said when Members were in opposition must be taken with a grain of salt because they do not carry the same weight as when somebody goes into Government, sits at the top of the table and must be responsible and accountable.

It is not at all uncommon for major projects to have changes made while the contract is under way, notwithstanding that contract, and the project is under construction. This happens because somebody sits down, assesses the progress made to date, gets advice based on tests which must take place all the time and reaches a conclusion. The conclusion, in this case, is that it is in the interests of the project that we look at this issue now and do whatever has to be done in this regard. I hope it is being done.

My last point about this aspect concerns the claim that this is the wrong place to have this hospital. Are we going to change and drag this facility around now? Will we take it somewhere else? One group of people want it in Blanchardstown. A big organisation and hundreds of signatures are involved. I have been told there are even thousands of signatures. Will we move this hospital when its location has already been decided? Other people want this facility to be in a different hospital. Others still want it to be constructed on a greenfield site. No matter where this hospital was put, in the final analysis it would not have satisfied the people who have subsequently been critical, and this is a fact, even if we were to wait forever and continue to go around in the same circles. We could talk about knowing there is a scandal. We could continue in this vein and talk about the need to blame someone for it. Get a life and wake up. The project is expensive. It was always going to be expensive. The project is as was costed, with a bit of variation.