Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)

I listened to the Tánaiste give Pearse Doherty an answer with regard to the national children's hospital. He was like an under-pressure estate agent furiously trying to sell an overpriced, extortionate and exorbitant hospital to an increasingly angry population at the moment. Nobody is arguing about the quality of the hospital; we are arguing about the price and the length of time it has taken to deliver. Leo Varadkar promised that it would be delivered by 2020 for €700 million, save for "an asteroid hitting the planet", yet it has ballooned to €2.2 billion. Today, five years after that initial opening date, there is still no confirmation about when it will open.

The opening date has been postponed 15 times and I and many people do not believe it will be open by 2027 at this rate. The national children's hospital is a monument to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael waste and blame-shifting. Their figures are all over this extra spending of €1.5 billion. This money did not appear from nowhere. It has come from the pockets of hard-working Irish citizens and taxpayers. It is also not a victimless crime. In terms of opportunity costs, that €1.5 billion would have paid for more than 4,500 homes. It would have housed up to 18,000 people, which is more than the number of people currently homeless.

The Tánaiste, though, is the blame-shifting expert in this country. Simon "it wasn't me" Harris is what we have in front of us at the moment. When he had a debate with me on national television during the election regarding this issue, he stated clearly he did not sign this contract. In a statement to millions of people across the country, he said he was not responsible for the signature on that contract. Will the Tánaiste say whether he was lying to the people of Ireland on that day? Was he lying to the people watching that programme about whether he is responsible for this contract? This contract lacks an enormous amount of detail and this has allowed it to become a blank cheque for the contractor. It was designed to fail from the start. It has been acknowledged that the design was not actually complete when instructions were issued to BAM to begin phase B of the construction works in January 2019. This is an incredible situation on a project that is so large and expensive.

The Tánaiste said the buck stops with him. What does that sentence actually mean? If he were the senior executive of a company where a project overran its schedule by five years and cost €1.5 billion more than it should have, he simply would not be working there anymore. Yet he is the Tánaiste of this State. I believe he is in his job because he is insulated by Fianna Fáil and Independent TDs.

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