Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

At 309 beds and €270 million, the Irish people will pay four times more per bed than was paid in England just a few years ago. By any measure this is an outrageous overspend. It is an insult to every taxpayer and citizen. It is an insult to every doctor and nurse working in outdated facilities or understaffed teams. It is an insult to the more than 500,000 people waiting to see a consultant. It is an insult to every child waiting for surgery or a wheelchair or special needs support. It is an insult to every young person desperately waiting for access to child and adolescent mental health services. The Government's response has not been to put up its hands and state it got it badly wrong and will do everything it can to fix it; the Government's response has been to deny and defend.

In September 2017, the Minister for Health was told he was already looking at an overrun of €61 million. I will put this in context. In recent days, Deputy Michael McGrath obtained figures from the HSE that looked at overruns of health projects of more than €10 million. The combined overrun in the past decade was €30 million. In September 2017, the Minister, Deputy Harris, was told he was already looking at an overrun of €61 million, more than twice the combined overrun for the entire capital spend in health over a decade but, having been told this, in the subsequent year he never once asked for an update. At the same time, he was trying to get his head around a €700 million overrun on the current expenditure side but never once asked whether the €61 million overrun on the children's hospital had increased or reduced. Finally, a year later, he was told it had increased from €61 million to approximately €400 million and they would get back to him with an exact figure soon enough. What did he do? He withheld the information from the House, for which he has apologised, he withheld the information from the Taoiseach and he withheld the information from the Minister for Finance, in spite of a PR firm being hired to come up with communication strategies for the overspend. We are now told that even if the Minister had told the Taoiseach, the Dáil and the Minister for Finance he was looking at the overspend of approximately €400 million it would not have affected the health budget for 2019. We are being told this at the same time as the health budget for 2019 is being changed because of the overrun.

We were told originally that the massive overrun was due to inflation but then we got documents to show this was not true. An attempt was made in the Chamber to shift the blame to unnamed contractors for lowballing but that strategy very quickly failed also. Now we are told that the mistakes were made by what the Taoiseach has described as agents of the State but even these mysterious agents of the State did not let the costs out of control. All they are guilty of is underestimating the cost at the start.

We were told that €650 million was a reasonable price to pay. We are told today that €1.7 billion is a reasonable price to pay for the same hospital. We were told by the Minister for Health that the only scandal regarding this would have been a decision to cancel the project. No - a €1 billion additional spend on the same hospital is a scandal. Recently, when the Taoiseach was pressed on what mistakes his Government actually made, he said he did not think that if it had been monitoring it any more closely that somehow it could have made it cheaper to build but, perhaps, in terms of the timing of communications that it could have made the public and media aware sooner. In this entire debacle the only blame the Taoiseach is willing to accept for his Government is that perhaps it should have told us all about it a little bit quicker. That is it. That is all it is willing to accept. Every expert I have spoken to about this has said that major construction projects routinely run over and are routinely brought back into budget. That is how the world works; it is just not how the national children's hospital works.

We were told that serious efforts were made to reduce the costs but then we were given more than 100 documents, and these documents do not show any serious effort to reduce the costs. In fact, it was Fianna Fáil that asked for the PwC terms of reference to change to include looking at ways to reduce the costs. The Government's terms of reference did not even ask PwC to do this.

It is essential that the national children's hospital be co-located with a maternity hospital. We were told the Coombe Women's and Infants University Hospital would move to the St. James's Hospital site but a few weeks ago, in response to a parliamentary question, we were told the project to move the Coombe Hospital is at an early stage and has yet to progress to planning and design phases. The St. James's Hospital site was chosen seven years ago but basic planning and design to move the Coombe Gospital to the St James's Hospital site has not even started. We were told a workforce planning exercise would be done to ensure the new children's hospital would be fully staffed but the reality is it is struggling to find staff even for the satellite centres.

We have now reached a point, it is fair to say, that when it comes to the children's hospital nobody believes a single word the Government says. Here is what we do know. The clinicians at the three children's hospitals are doing everything they can to provide the highest possible quality of care but those facilities are no longer fit for purpose. They do not have the diagnostics, equipment or space.

That is putting significant pressure on sick children, their families and the clinicians. We know these children urgently need a new hospital. If the children's hospital opens as planned - the opening has been delayed until 2023 - it will have taken 11 years from the St. James's site being chosen and 17 years from the Government decision to build a new children's hospital.

We know that there are material risks to moving the site. There are very strong reasons for choosing the Connolly site over the St. James's one, but there are very serious timing risks involved in any contemplation of moving the site. We also know that there was and continues to be a lack of consensus among clinicians and other stakeholders with regard to the choice of the current site. All Members are acutely aware of the genuine anger and real fear felt by many parents of sick children regarding the potential access difficulties and other issues associated with the current site.

In that light, Fianna Fáil has tabled an amendment to the motion which calls on the Government to ensure that the ongoing PwC report includes an extensive value engineering analysis to identify options for reducing the cost overrun, to produce urgently a costed and timetabled plan for the delivery of the new Coombe hospital on the existing site, to redesign the process for public procurement such that it does not take 17 years to build a hospital, to include in the PwC report, in light of the massive cost overruns, an analysis of the total costs and potential time implications of moving from St. James's to the Connolly site, and to act on the chronic clinical recruitment and retention issues being experienced such that when the hospital opens, it will have the doctors, nurses and other wonderful healthcare staff it needs.

It is highly unlikely that moving the site would be the right thing to do for sick children. There are significant cost implications and, more seriously, significant time implications. The project could be delayed for another ten years. I hope to God it will not be, but that is a real risk. On balance, moving the hospital at this point is not the right thing to do. The wrong site may have been chosen at the start. However, there are eminent clinicians and parents of very sick children who passionately believe that building the hospital at St. James's is still the right thing to do. If for no reason other than to respect those doctors, nurses, parents and children, Fianna Fáil believes the PwC report should run the rule over the cost and timing implications and that it is critical that the Government gets to grips with getting the cost back down and the maternity hospital constructed and ensuring we can fill it with the best doctors, nurses and healthcare professionals possible.

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