Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The pressure this Government feels to deliver this project arises from our concern for parents, for quality paediatric healthcare and for children.

It is not correct to say that we have blown €0.5 billion in public money. The money has not even been spent yet. We took a decision in December to go ahead with this project. Having discovered that we underestimated the cost of this project, we had three options. The first was to cancel the project, leave €250 million behind us and start all over again, thus potentially deferring the project for a generation. The second option was to re-tender and the best advice was that if we re-tendered we would not find anyone who could do it cheaper or quicker. The third option was to proceed, and we took the decision to proceed and that is now what we are doing.

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