Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I have already asked a question about income thresholds and I will add this further comment. The Taoiseach has gone on and on about a social mix in housing but the failure to raise the income thresholds for social housing makes a nonsense of social mix because nurses, council workers and people who are on low-to-average earnings are being whacked off the social housing list. That completely eliminates any notion of social mix and at the same time no affordable housing scheme has been delivered so no council can move ahead, in reality, with an affordable housing scheme.

I want to ask questions about the national children's hospital. The Taoiseach spoke earlier about his party's fiscal prudence and said that Fine Gael prides itself on its financial management as against the irresponsible populous representatives he accuses us of being. How did he manage to mismanage an infrastructural project of this importance and this scale, such that we have a 300% increase in the costs from the original tender? Did anybody bother to look at the rotten record of BAM, which got it and was €120 million lower than the nearest other bid. That should have raised alarm bells. It built car parks in Holland that collapsed. It had to make settlements with Cambridgeshire County Council over massive overruns on road projects. It built the Ballyfermot Leisure Centre on which there was a significant overrun and it had a five-year long battle with the council about who would pick up the tab for the overrun.

There were also significant overruns in the Port of Cork. Did anybody bother looking into Mr. Costello's record on a project board? He was involved with significant overruns when working for Sisk in Poland and these nearly led the company to collapse. Is it any wonder he stated that there was no problem with BAM's tender because he had a record of it?

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