Mr. John Pollock:

The process was twofold. We first issued a suitability assessment questionnaire, SAQ, to ensure we got the best teams, both international and Irish, to bring forward to the official tendering stage. We received a huge response, as the Deputy will imagine. We then drew up a shortlist of six companies, most of which were consortiums in that they had an international architectural partner and a local architectural partner. One of the criteria was that the bidders needed to have experience of designing a children's hospital. We were not prepared to have somebody learning on the project, which meant the company had to demonstrate a track record on designing a children's hospital. We went through the suitability assessment questionnaire and drew up a short list of six.

Within the development board, there is probably greater oversight than is normal in that we set up technical evaluation panels for each individual discipline. The architects featured on one panel, while civil and structural engineering was another. There were eight different members of the design team. Each of these had a technical evaluation team, which would have had expertise to evaluate, whether in the area of architecture, engineering or urban planning. We had a financial evaluation panel which assessed the fees tendered for the project.

A steering group oversaw the entire process and all eight technical evaluation teams fed into that group to ensure consistency on how we dealt with the design teams. The steering group reported back to the development board for sign off.