Brian Ó Domhnaill (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I want to touch on the issue of the children's hospital, what has been said here and the fact that the cost overruns are escalating to in the region of €2 billion.The famous Austrian-born but American business and management consultant, Peter Drucker, once said that management by objectives works but it only works where the objectives are correct. Clearly, the objectives relating to the children's hospital were not correct. The scope of the project, we now know, was all over the place and was not clear. While the Minister is far removed from the day-to-day management operations of the project, nonetheless, the buck stops with him.

We can criticise the children's hospital all we want but this is going to happen again and again. We saw it with the Luas and the port tunnel. The public sector in general, irrespective of which Government is in control, is unable to manage a budget allocation. The financial scrutiny and financial framework need to be in place right at the beginning of a project, and that includes the site selection, which was all over the place for this project so that, ultimately, a political decision selected the site. We now know that it is, in fact, the wrong site, and any cursory glance at the financials shows that the project is involved in all sorts of operations that are nothing to do with a children's hospital.

Accountability must begin somewhere. Officials within the Department of Health and the HSE must be held accountable. This is another glaring example of the lack of accountability within the HSE. We have the resignation of one chief executive, who is replaced by another. The Minister for Health is before the health committee today but all he will do is defend the increase in spending and provide a rationale for it. There is a bigger issue, which is the national planning framework, a massive injection of capital spending over the next 20 years. We now see that the State does not have the capacity, the financial framework or the financial oversight capability to implement that.