Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent)
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I believe the witnesses, as independent observers and experts, can look at how we are doing our business, the processes we are using, what that is costing and how we can save money by doing things differently. I go back to the Dublin Port tunnel. It is the example I will give. There was talk at the time that it was not high enough to take trucks, it was leaking and it was going to fall in on top of people. There were delays with it, etc. We have the same repeated now with the children's hospital. After the Dublin Port tunnel, we brought in all these checks and balances and all these gateway approvals so that one could not do anything until one got approval from somebody to do something, etc. Still we are repeating the mistakes up in the children's hospital. What I am saying is that is where we have to be looking. We need to focus on the way we are doing business, the methods we use and the time delays we have caused ourselves by putting in so many checks and balances. We have so many people who are checking on something and checking on something else and one has Departments cross-checking one another. Genuinely, when the Office of Public Works prepares a flood relief scheme, it goes through all of the checks and balances and the tender comes back. It then has to go back into the Department of public expenditure and reform, which will spend 18 months trawling through the lot of it before it gets onto the ground. That is wipeout.