Mr. Stephen Flanagan:

We are aware of our duty with regard to European regulations when expending funds for our mandated services. While we have a level of non-compliance, we believe we have in place all the appropriate governance structures, policies and processes one would expect of a public entity of our materiality. Unfortunately, when running a live hospital environment, there are challenges. Some of those challenges are borne out in the non-compliance we see. For instance, the Deputy mentioned laboratories. Laboratories would have come into use across these hospitals historically under some clinical guidance, not through procurement processes, for externals. Now, at this point, procurement will be the correct route. For CHI, as we prepare for day one-go live at the new hospital, we have some very large procurements we need to do. We need to take all those laboratories and procure altogether what we call a managed laboratory service. In some sense, this precludes us from actioning these issues now to ensure that we are ready for day one-go live at the new children’s hospital.

That is just one of many challenges in that regard.

Some of the infrastructure in the likes of Temple Street, while we have frameworks in place for contractors, etc., is too large essentially to react urgently when you have a Portakabin on top of a flat roof and some guy has to go in underneath and fix that roof on a Tuesday morning to stop a ward being closed down. It is a challenging environment. We do have good systems and policies, and processes, in place.