Jonathan O'Brien (Cork North Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister has stepped out of the Chamber but he will be back for the question-and-answer section.

I welcome that the PwC report was published in a timely fashion. This is important because it gave us all an opportunity to have the report and to be able to go through it forensically - especially those of us on the Committee of Public Accounts, who will be dealing with the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board in the next weeks.

I only have a couple of minutes so I want to focus on just one area, which is the narrative the Minister is now putting out that he has been vindicated in the decision to go ahead with the construction of the national children's hospital. The Minister fails to actually explain to people that the whole point of the two-stage process was that if we were not happy with the guaranteed minimum price process there was an option to pull out and re-tender. There was a difficulty, however, in that by the time of the decision and by the time the Minister, the Department and the Cabinet had all of that information, that option was no longer an option. I do not believe it is fair for the Minister to say he has been vindicated in the decision to go ahead. He left it so late that he had no option but to go ahead. This is an important point.

I shall now turn to the issue of the steering committee and the project programme committee that were put in to oversee the development board. The PwC report was very critical of the powers of those two groups. The steering group was made up of Department of Health and HSE officials. Among some issues outlined by the report was the point that it was a pretty toothless oversight process. The group could only deal with information that was given to it. There was also a lot of criticism of the board itself. This is a challenge for the Minister. We have a report that is very critical of the role of the board. The Minister has said he will strengthen the board but unfortunately, there is no legislation to allow this unless the Minister removes members of the board. This is contrary to what the Minister said at the health committee last week when he told us he does have the power to put additional members on to the board. I checked the statutory instruments and this is not the case. The maximum number of people on the board is set out in legislation. For the Minister to do what he proposes, and to bring in some expertise to the board, he needs to remove some board members. I do not know when the Minister proposes to do this.

I will put that question to him later. The report, which cost more than €500,000 or €4,500 per page, is a costly report. Much of the information contained in it was contained in the Mazars report. The only good thing to come out of it, in addition to what we already knew, is the recommendations, which the Government says it needs time to review but is committed to implementing in full. That remains to be seen. I hope that the Minister will be in the Chamber for the questions and answers session.

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