Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

At the outset, there needs to be an Oireachtas inquiry into the escalating cost of the children's hospital. The Taoiseach said earlier that when he was Minister for Health he thought it would cost €650 million. Yet in a couple of years, it has gone up to apparently to €1.7 billion, according to a Cabinet memorandum that was evidently given to The Irish Times. This was given days after the Taoiseach told me it was €1.4 billion. It seems the Dáil is the last place to be told anything in detail. I asked the Taoiseach in the last session of the Dail whether that the upper limit and, to be fair, he did not say it was but he did not use the figure of €1.7 billion, which is in the memorandum. The Irish Timesgot this memorandum from somebody, and it must have been someone in government, and it published it and a lot of material on this. To go from €650 million to €1.7 billion in approximately two years demands detailed explanation. We all know the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform keeps a tight rein on capital projects and it is meant to do so and there are procedures and mechanisms for that. It is not enough to say that a hospital group has been given carte blancheto do and spend anything it likes. That is not the way it works and I hope that was not what was being suggested earlier today in the answer to a substantive question asked by another Deputy during Leaders' Questions. There needs to be an Oireachtas inquiry of some sort and there should be full accountability as to how it has jumped from €650 million to €1.7 billion.

On the issue of the meningitis B vaccine, I am perturbed as to how that is being introduced. I happened to be the Minister for Health when the meningitis C vaccine became available and we did a full programme that cost €50 million at the time, most of which was a once-off cost because it was dealing with all children. There was no hesitation about that at the time given the expert advice. The Department of Finance accepted at the time that it had to be done on public health grounds.

The meningitis B vaccine was not ready at the time and the advice was that the impact of meningitis B could be potentially worse than meningitis C. There needs to be a very serious review of how the meningitis B vaccine is being rolled out because of its devastating impact on children and young people generally when the illness occurs.

I could raise many other issues, but I do not have the time. I ask the Taoiseach to comment on the article by Susan Mitchell last weekend on Sláintecare in which she said the hospital groups would be broken up and merged into regional integrated care organisations, RICOs. In a speech in November 2015, the Taoiseach heralded the hospital groups as central to reform. Has that changed, and does he now support the proposals to abolish them at the start of the Sláintecare project?

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