Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

One point on which I am absolutely certain is that if we had found ourselves in a position where we had accepted a more expensive bid for the national children's hospital, we would now be facing many different charges regarding why that happened. Had the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board, the body that made the decision, decided to go ahead with a bid that was not the cheapest, I would now be facing questions about that as well. I am well aware of the public anger and disappointment with what went wrong with this hospital and we will do better on projects of that scale like that in the future, because we do very well on many other infrastructure projects for which we are responsible.

If I am going to take credit for what I believe we can do well, I will take responsibility for what goes wrong as well. That is the way I have handled this. I am under no illusion that if we had gone ahead with a project tender that was more expensive than the lowest one, then the Deputy would be raising that with me here today.

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