Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions
Dail Éireann — 2021-07-08
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Pearse Doherty (SF), Donegal

With respect, from listening to the Minister's answer, I believe that the Cabinet has taken a hands-off approach to this.
The Government does not know what the estimated costs are. Maybe it does not want to know. Where I do agree with the Government is that the root cause of this is the two-stage procurement process, a process Deputy Varadkar, as Minister for Health, signed off on. The cause of this is ministerial incompetence. The PwC report found it was not because of inflation or other matters but the lack of budgeting and failures in crucial planning at the early stages. That is why we have a situation in which Leo Varadkar promised this project would be built by 2020 and the all-in costs, including contingency and inflation, would be €650 million. We now have a figure of €1.7 billion. We have 900 outstanding claims.
As leader of his party and a senior member of Cabinet, can the Minister not even tell the Dáil what the total quantum of those claims is? Are we supposed to allow the Government to continue to write a blank cheque for this project? What actions is the Cabinet taking to make sure costs are reined it? Or is it the case that it had made such a mess of this in the 2014 to 2016 period that it has to pay no matter what comes?

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2021-07-08/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:49:30+00:00
Sitting date: 2021-07-08