Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Earlier I read some documentation dating back to when I was a councillor in the area of St. James’s Hospital, which is in my constituency. Along with Councillor Tina McVeigh, I made a lengthy objection to An Bord Pleanála on the location of the children's hospital. We did not believe the site was the correct one for the hospital as the scale and the impact was too big for the location and the character and size of the area. Despite all the positive comments about public transport in and out of the hospital, it is quite a difficult area to reach, with bottlenecks on the South Circular Road, James's Street and around Ceannt Fort beside it. One of the measures Councillor Tina McVeigh did manage to retrieve from the process was the establishment of a residents monitoring committee. She told me earlier that the big issue at the moment is the structural impact on the houses in Ceannt Fort where some are showing cracks in the walls.

They rattle and shake during the impact of the construction. There is massive noise, dirt and pollution and the construction traffic is a nightmare. The same will be true for the construction traffic coming down Davitt Road from Drimnagh in the future.

All said and done, An Bord Pleanála passed it and the hospital was to go ahead. As the fellow said, we are where we are and we get to where we are. Much has been said about the mess in which we are. However, I want to draw particular attention to the process of public procurement itself. It has been proved to be entirely flawed not just in the case in the children's hospital but in the case of broadband. In 2013, when the Government, of which Deputy Kelly was a member, and the troika ran the country, it was decided we needed a public procurement officer. Mr. Quinn was appointed as the State's first public procurement officer and is still in place. His aim at the time of his appointment was to save the public purse €500 million. Six years later and one only needs to look at the mess we are in with broadband. In answer to a parliamentary question I tabled, it was stated €18 million was spent on finding out which company could retender for the broadband plan. We are now left with one bidder which is as an entire mess. It looks like the rest of the country will be left in the dark if compared, as the Minister is fond of doing, with the rural electrification process in the 1950s.

What is striking about what is going on with public procurement is that the public procurement officer is also a member of the board of the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board. He, however, failed to tell the Minister for Finance and Public Expenditure and Reform that an overspend had occurred. The Taoiseach stood over that in the House stating that if somebody is on a board, his or her fiduciary and legal responsibilities are to the board and the correct line of accountability is to the chairman of that board, not the line Minister. We now know that this is not the case. It still remains for the Taoiseach to correct the record of the Dáil.

The next biggest farce in all of this is that the investigation into the overruns is being carried out by PwC. There has to be a conflict of interest when PwC has long-standing relationships with the main contractor, BAM, and the HSE. We have tabled an amendment to the motion, which we will be supporting, that there should be a time limit put on an investigation, namely, six weeks. Otherwise we could have an overrun of time as well as of money.

The Government is behaving like Macbeth, the king who was afraid to step back from the blood he was up to his knees in. It is about time the Government pulled out of this and investigated an alternative.

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