Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

At the initial tender process stage, did nobody ask why one bid was €132 million less than every other bid? If that was me I would find such situation alarming. If I was tendering for a contract to install a few presses I would wonder how someone else could do the job for substantially less. I do not believe there are other people who could escalate the costs at quite that rate. Perhaps they could if they thought they would be given a blank cheque for such work. The board selected the cheapest bidder.

The initial figure was just over €600 million. It is now €1.7 billion. No one inside or outside this room would be surprised if it reached €2 billion. Did no alarm bells go off?

Mr. Costello has been in his position for five and a half years. In that time, what sort of updates did he give the Minister? Relatively recently, the Minister said in the media that the cost would be €605 million and that he was fully confident the project would be delivered on time, on budget, etc. The figure is now multiples of that and could be multiples more. In terms of briefing the Minister, how many meetings did Mr. Costello have with him, what was the format of such meetings and was the Minister kept apprised of all of the cost overruns?

If I get the chance, I wish to go through the table that the witnesses supplied the committee in order to get some detail of how these figures were arrived at. If Mr. Costello was not asking the hard questions about how this was happening, was the Minister not asking them either? Notwithstanding the fact that we need investment, this is a substantial amount of money and it now appears that, on the back of an assertion that the costs would be controlled and certainly would not escalate at this rate, it will come at the expense of other badly needed projects.