Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister of State said that the realistic and least risky option available to the Government to avoid long delay and potentially the non-delivery of a children's hospital was to carry on regardless. I do not accept that. The notion that the hospital will not be built is untrue. It will be built by somebody and if the Government improved the contract, it would save a lot of money. That is a fact.

Given that so many mistakes have been made, and the Government has accepted it has made many mistakes, how come nobody is being held responsible? Why are the legal team, Cantor Fitzgerald, not being held to account? Do they not have insurance? I do not understand that. There is no sense to it. If the Government is not going to hold consultants to account when they fuck up, it should stop hiring them. The idea of hiring consultants is to ensure they will take responsibility for their decisions. We are hiring consultants and paying them crazy amounts of money but not asking them to be accountable for what they did. We are not calling in the professional indemnity. Why were they hired in the first place? The Government says it will learn from these mistakes. I do not believe it will. If it cannot hold private consultants to account I suggest it stops hiring them. I suggest the Government should hire people of quality to work in Departments who have the know-how to be able to deal with these problems.

I refer to the people who oversaw what went on with the children's hospital - the contract and the way the board worked. It is nonsense. The Government is putting up with it, and it is losing this country hundreds of millions of euro. If it retendered it could change that but it does not want to retender because it would not look good and the project might be stalled while the Government parties are running in the next election. That is nonsense and it is not the way to run a country. I am being serious.

I cannot get over the fact that the Government has managed this project so poorly. There are so many questions that have not been answered. I would say I have asked 50 questions in this House that were not answered. There is so much confusion about everything. The Government is now hiding behind consultants who gave bad advice and a board that is not accountable. How laughable is it that a guy who was involved with an illegal board - with McCann Fitzgerald - and who was on the hospital board is now moving over to the Land Development Agency? How many mistakes does someone have to make in these bodies before the Government stops offering them work in other bodies? I predict that the Land Development Agency will be another part of the problem. It will be another quango that will not deliver for the people in the same way this hospital board has not delivered. The consultants who were hired and paid crazy amounts of money in terms of the children's hospital have not been held to account and have not come up with goodies. When will things change? This is absolute rubbish.

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