Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats)
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Part of the reason there was a slippage in the delivery time was that there was insufficient work at the early stages. There were not enough construction workers on that site. The point I made at a previous meeting was that contracts go both ways. There is an obligation to pay for the work that is done but, equally, there is an obligation to do the work that is contracted for. That slippage is potentially very problematic because we can see there is a significant problem with building costs inflation. That is one of the issues in respect of which I think we need to understand where the controls are. This will not be the last hospital we will build. It is to be hoped we will not in the future build hospitals in the same way as the national children's hospital has been built in terms of how the tender process worked.

I remember very clearly one occasion on which witnesses were before this committee to discuss this. When you tender for something and then you make changes, that is where costs are going to arise. For example, there were changes to the hand basins. They were going to be changed to stainless steel for infection control purposes. I would have thought that was self-evident hospital infection control. You put in your maximum at that stage because it is going to cause you a problem if you do not.

We need to be learning lessons as well as everything else from what went wrong with this project in terms of the escalating costs. If we do not learn those lessons, we are going to repeat exactly the same mistakes again when we go to build another hospital. Already we are talking about the very controversial location for the national maternity hospital because of the ownership of the site. First it was €300 million, then it was €500 million, then it was €800 million, so there is a very significant issue here with procurement. This is a project in respect of which we can better understand where things can go wrong and how things can cause more problems than anticipated. It is very important we properly scrutinise that so we understand it and we look at the contractual side, because if it is in the interest of a contractor, whether it is this site or any other site, to elongate the timeframe for something at a time when there is building costs inflation, of course the timeline is going to slip and of course it is going to cost more.