Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I would like to go back and forth quickly enough with the Minister, if possible. We have been waiting for the past few weeks for the Mazars report, which was commissioned towards the end of last year to examine the reasons for the cost escalation and so forth, similar to what the PwC review will examine. We received the Mazars report approximately two hours ago and I want to focus my initial questions on it because it does put to bed some of the reasons or excuses we have heard so far. According to the report, the construction costs between April 2017 and November 2018, a period of a year and a half, went up by 56%. At committee, the first line of defence we heard, not from the Minister but from the Department, the HSE and the hospital development board, was that the increase was due to inflation. In fact, one of the Minister's colleagues said at a committee meeting earlier that this entire increase can be explained away by inflation. The Mazars report gives us the figures we have been waiting for and tells us that there was a 56% increase in construction costs in 18 months. The base case included an assumption on inflation of 4% and we know from the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland that construction inflation in that period was 6%. Inflation, therefore, was only 2% more than was allowed for in the contract. Given a 56% increase in costs and only a 2% additional increase in inflation, does the Minister accept that inflation does not explain the vast majority of the cost overrun?

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