Results 16,161-16,180 of 32,593 for speaker:Paschal Donohoe

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach (5 Feb 2019)

Paschal Donohoe: To be clear, the projected cost of the project we are referring to, the national children's hospital, currently stands at €1.4 billion, though as another committee has heard it is possible it will go beyond that. In regard to my engagement on different projects, I note that I am updated on projects as issues surrounding them develop, if they develop. It is relatively rare-----

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach (5 Feb 2019)

Paschal Donohoe: I received an update in one of the ongoing meetings I have with my team on health expenditure. At no point in any of those meetings did I have any indication that there was an issue on that project.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach (5 Feb 2019)

Paschal Donohoe: I do not believe we will be in a position where I will be talking about projects not going ahead.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach (5 Feb 2019)

Paschal Donohoe: To be completely clear, I will be in a position to talk about projects throughout 2019. I am very confident at this point that we will be able to meet the additional costs arising from the national children's hospital and meet specific commitments for projects in the next year. I believe we will be able to do that. In regard to the information that was available to me, when I became...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach (5 Feb 2019)

Paschal Donohoe: It happened in a meeting on 9 November. I do not know if it was the Minister for Health or one of his officials who made the information available. Shortly after that meeting I got a phone call from my team to let me know of the matter.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach (5 Feb 2019)

Paschal Donohoe: It was one of our routine and regular meetings.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach (5 Feb 2019)

Paschal Donohoe: We have an agenda that is agreed at each of those meetings and it came up then. When the issue developed and I was notified of it I was under no illusion regarding the scale of this problem.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach (5 Feb 2019)

Paschal Donohoe: I had an awful lot of engagement with the Minister on both current and capital issues. If he had raised the issue with me at that point, I would have asked him to do what he was then doing. At all points in the process, he was doing his best to manage a very complicated and challenging project.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach (5 Feb 2019)

Paschal Donohoe: Regardless of-----

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach (5 Feb 2019)

Paschal Donohoe: As a former Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, I am equally aware of some of the challenges the current Minister, Deputy Ross, is facing. Regardless of the colleague involved, my attitude on this issue would be the same. A very serious issue has developed and it meant that both the Minister for Health and I were left with very difficult choices. It is something that there have...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach (5 Feb 2019)

Paschal Donohoe: I acknowledge and I restate that there are aspects of how this project has developed and there are effects and consequences from which there will be clear learnings and that we will need to look at how this needs to be done differently. What is very challenging about this situation is that we manage and are responsible for hundreds of projects across the country that are delivered in the way...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach (5 Feb 2019)

Paschal Donohoe: I am restating that we will not be involved in any procedure that leads to the development of checks on the Border. I want to be clear about that. In the event of a disorderly Brexit occurring, because the UK will become a third country, there will be checks in place for goods that are coming from the United Kingdom into Ireland.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach (5 Feb 2019)

Paschal Donohoe: That will have to be the subject of engagement that we have with the European Commission. In that case, given the shared objective of the Commission, the UK and Ireland of having no infrastructure on the Border to deal with this issue, we will have to have engagement with the Commission to see how the movement of goods would then be managed.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach (5 Feb 2019)

Paschal Donohoe: What we want to do is be in a position where we have as low friction trade as possible in the kind of scenario the Deputy is describing. To go back to what I have said, as the Deputy has just acknowledged, the whole reason we want a backstop in the first place is to avoid being in a scenario of having a risk to movement of goods on our Ireland. If we are in a situation of a disorderly...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach (5 Feb 2019)

Paschal Donohoe: On the composition of taxes and spending that would be affected in a no-deal scenario, the areas that would have the most immediate effect would be spending programmes that, for example, might be related to the consequences of people not being in work or having less work. For example, our social supports and Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection spending programmes might be...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach (5 Feb 2019)

Paschal Donohoe: On my use of the adjective "preliminary", I only said preliminary because they are contingent on an event that is still a number of weeks away. We hope a disorderly Brexit does not happen. We, including the Minister, Deputy Heather Humphreys, in particular, have had a lot of engagement on the issue and Commissioner Vestager has confirmed that the Commission is ready to help with this matter....

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach (5 Feb 2019)

Paschal Donohoe: Most of the engagement that has taken place has been between the Central Bank and the firms or entities that it regulates. I met a deputy governor of the Central Bank, Mr. Ed Sibley, yesterday and it appears that all of the work that needs to be done to enable financial services entities to be ready for a disorderly Brexit has now either happened or is due to be completed in the coming weeks.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach (5 Feb 2019)

Paschal Donohoe: The figures I have, which have been verified, are in line with the figures that the Secretary General of the Department of Health and Minister for Health indicated to the Joint Committee on Health. They outlined a figure of €1.4 billion, with different contingencies that could increase the figure. Those figures have been shared with us and we believe that they reflect the different...

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach (5 Feb 2019)

Paschal Donohoe: I believe much of the preparatory work has been done to enable construction to move to the main building.

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach (5 Feb 2019)

Paschal Donohoe: I am happy with it now. We have had significant engagement, as I have said a few times at this meeting, on the matter since the run-up to the Cabinet decision on the matter in December.