Results 16,421-16,440 of 32,864 for speaker:Paschal Donohoe

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

Paschal Donohoe: I have a lot of engagement with the Minister, Deputy Harris, on a whole variety of different matters, including on this and other matters that the Deputy will raise with me. I have a lot of engagement with him on capital projects, but, more broadly, on the level of capital expenditure and capital resources that are available to his Department at any point in time. When he alerted me to this...

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

Paschal Donohoe: I meet the capital team within my Department regularly and it updates me on various matters that develop. It was through engagement between the Department of Health and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform in early November that we became aware of this issue and then became active on it. On the Chairman's question on whether a member of my Department was on the board, the answer...

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

Paschal Donohoe: I met my colleague, who is a member of this board, to have a discussion with him on his experience on the board because I am conscious of the fact that his role in this is, understandably, being debated and questioned in the way the Chairman has done, and which he is entitled to do. In my meeting with Mr. Quinn, my official who is on the board and who leads the Office of Government...

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

Paschal Donohoe: What is different in the question the Chairman has put to me is that the engagement at that point was taking place between the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board, of which Mr. Quinn was a member, the HSE and the Department of Health. The board is an agency that was associated with the Government Departments in question and Mr. Quinn could see heavy engagement under way between...

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

Paschal Donohoe: He was appointed in a personal capacity by a previous Minister for Health but I do not want to make any kind of distinction between him as a person and as somebody who would be aware of his responsibilities as a procurement professional or board member.

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

Paschal Donohoe: Yes, he would have been subjected to the provisions of that circular. Putting the answer to that question in context, Mr. Quinn was a member of the board at the point at which it interrogated the evolving issue of an overspend and projected increase in costs of the national children's hospital. He was engaged with the issue and he could see the engagement that was taking place between the...

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

Paschal Donohoe: Yes, they did.

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

Paschal Donohoe: Both processes in relation to that began to develop across the summer. That resulted in a communication to the HSE or the Department of Health towards the end of August.

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

Paschal Donohoe: I will have to come back to the Deputy with an answer on the finance committee. I cannot give an answer to the committee now but of course I can find out. From the discussion I had with Mr. Quinn it appears that engagement on this issue, at least at board level, happened throughout the summer, leading to communication at the end of August.

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

Paschal Donohoe: No. As Minister I sanction recommendations that come from other Departments. I will spell out what that means in order to deal with my responsibility in this, which I want to deal with centrally. A Department outlines a project it wants to carry out and it makes a recommendation to me on the project if it is above a certain scale. I ultimately have to supply that sanction to that...

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

Paschal Donohoe: I will deal with each of those queries in turn. First I wish to address my responsibility in relation to individual projects, particularly those above a certain scale. They are tracked by the different teams in my Department that shadow each Vote. I fully accept my responsibility for the use of taxpayers' money for this or any other project. That is why the decision I ultimately made on...

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-----