Eoghan Murphy (Dublin Bay South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Each year we have sought to increase the budget for health, both current and capital funding, and where additional resources have been made available, health has been prioritised. I have been part of the negotiations where we have discussed increases in budgets. The cost overrun here is €450 million above what was profiled in the initial outline in 2017. About €320 million of that is for construction and €50 million is towards VAT. The rest is for equipment leasing, design teams and those types of things. That money must be spent to deliver this hospital.

It is wrong to conflate this with the issue of the nurses for several reasons. It is not true to say that nurses are not getting pay increases under the public service pay agreement. Changes are happening as a result of last year's review into issues around recruitment and retention. The challenges in the public sector go beyond nurses. The public service pay agreement is in place across the unions to ensure that we can restore losses in salary that were inflicted as a result of the crisis in a way that we do not step back into another crisis and have to cut salaries again. We must do everything in a sustainable way.

Let me be clear about the importance of the delivery of this hospital. That will cost money. We will get to the root of how these costs went from the initial outline for phase 2 announced in 2017-----

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