Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

In the same vein, the response of the Taoiseach earlier that this will be the best hospital and will last for 100 years is fine and great. We need the hospital and nobody objects to that but the issue here is the runaway cost. He described this project back in 2014-2015 as spectacular, and it will be spectacular when constructed. He said it would cost €650 million and would be fully operational this year. It will cost three times that and will not be fully operational for many years to come.

There are serious questions and we deserve answers as to how the Government got this so wrong. The Taoiseach will criticise others and will throw cheap shots but he was the Minister for Health. His colleague is the Minister for Health and he is the Taoiseach who told us that he was going to take a special role and interest in this. Every euro in terms of additional cost that will go into building this hospital will be taken from other public services, whether a school that will not be built, a community hospital that will be delayed or an extension to an existing hospital that will be delayed or put on the long finger. These are the concerns people have about this.

The Taoiseach tries to dismiss this as if everything is okay but this is a throwback to the Fianna Fáil era of calculations on the back of the brown envelope. If one closed one's eyes, one could pretend one was not talking about the national children's hospital but about the Dublin Port tunnel or one of the other capital projects Fianna Fáil continued to allow developers to benefit from in this State. The Taoiseach told us that would not happen with his Government and we expected it would not. Now that it has happened, he expects us just to ignore the fact these costs have increased to such a degree and expects us not to look for accountability.

There are serious questions in different communities. For example, in the Midland Regional Hospital in Mullingar, there are serious concerns that the MRI scanner that was part of Project Ireland 2040 will not be delivered as a result of the overruns in health. Are these the types of capital projects that will be cut or delayed? There is a responsibility on the Taoiseach, who has made such a cock-up of this over the past number of years, to explain to the public where the axe will fall? Which projects will be cut because his Government and his Ministers took their eye off the ball and did not ensure value for money on this project?

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