The PwC report on the very significant overspend on the national children's hospital represents a damning indictment of the Government's stewardship of the entire project. Red flags were missed, the public spending code was not adhered to, the project was poorly co-ordinated and controlled, there was fragmentation, poor communication and poor flow of information. That is all in the report. It also identifies a number of failures in the set-up, planning and budgeting of the national paediatric hospital project. It is a far cry from April 2016, when the then Minister for Health, the present Taoiseach, Deputy Varadkar, announced that it would cost approximately €650 million, including contingency and inflation. That €650 million has now risen to €1.7 billion with significant risks that it will rise further. The report outlines about six significant risks in the project relating to its budget, provisional sums, elements of the design yet to be finalised and inflation. If inflation goes up by 10%, there will be another €97 million increase. Construction inflation is currently at 7.1%. Other issues include schedule adherence and programme realignment.

When I asked the Taoiseach some time ago if he was confident that this would stay within €2 billion, he could not answer the question or give a definite view on that. The question that begs to be asked following the report is where were the Ministers for Public Expenditure and Reform and Health during all of this. They were clearly asleep at the wheel. They, along with the Taoiseach, made the glitzy announcements but challenged very little indeed. There was a change of governance in a letter in appendix G attached to the report. A new governance structure was established in May 2017. It is referred to in a letter, which I presume is from the Secretary General at the Department of Health. What led to that change of structure? Were the Ministers for Health and Public Expenditure and Reform alerted to that change of structure? There were problems emerging which were not shared. Did the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform know about it? I refer the Tánaiste to recommendation 11 of the report, which now states with regard to all future capital infrastructure projects, that "A central assurance and challenge function should be established within Government to provide consistent challenge to and review of major [public sector infrastructure] projects". That clearly suggests that there was no such challenge in Cabinet relating to this project. Most people would say that that challenge function is the role of the Ministers for Public Expenditure and Reform and Health. It is clear that no one challenged anything about this project. I would argue that there was too much politically invested in the project. The announcements were made but no one asked any hard questions at ministerial or Cabinet level. We see that in other projects too. With this extraordinary revelation of shambolic management of this project, where is the accountability for the Ministers for Health and Public Expenditure and Reform? Is it still their position that they were not alerted at any stage to any of the red flags that the report talks about, or to the range of failings identified in the report?

Yesterday, the Government published the report of the independent review of escalation of costs for the national children's hospital carried out by PwC, and it fully accepts its recommendations. This project is very important for Irish children for generations to come. It is finally under construction and the Connolly urgent care centre element of the project is on target to open this summer. The report acknowledges that the project is unique in scope, scale and complexity, compared with any other health infrastructure project in Ireland's history. It identifies a series of weaknesses in set-up, planning, budget execution and governance. The report states that two thirds of the €450 million cost increase was due to an underestimation of the real cost of the project. It also highlights other factors such as VAT, delays and changes in regulation and building standards. It is recognised that a programme of work of this nature can never be fully de-risked. Nevertheless, the report finds that there were significant weaknesses which led to an escalation of costs, which became known far too late in the process. The report considered the alternative option of retendering the work, as some in this House have suggested we should do, and concluded that this was an unrealistic fallback option and would have increased costs further, in all likelihood resulting in no hospital being built at all.

Our priority now must be to finish the job on time to meet the 2023 opening date, contain further cost increases, and learn from the mistakes made in advance of other major projects such as the metro and the national broadband plan. The Ministers for Public Expenditure and Reform and Health will come back to Government and, I assume, to the House, in a month to outline an implementation plan for the recommendations contained in this report. These include strengthening the rules that govern public sector spending and providing essential assurance and challenge functions, which the Deputy has just referred to, to provide consistent challenge and review of major projects through their life cycle. If the Deputy reads this report, as I am sure he has, he will see that there is a very clear explanation of what happened here. This is not wasted money or an overspend per se. It is a gross underestimate of what it costs to build a hospital of this standard and type.

The Tánaiste is in a hole. Stop digging.

We need to understand the systems failures that allowed that to happen and to ensure that they are not repeated. That is why the Government is committed and has already started the process of looking at how complex and large capital projects are managed from a procurement perspective-----

The Tánaiste does not believe that himself.

-----and a structural perspective to ensure that estimates that we have at the start of projects such as this turn out to be accurate at a later stage when final decisions are made on funding.

The Tánaiste's time is up.

The Government had a choice to make last December either to proceed with the project, knowing the full cost, to retender, which would probably have cost more in the end-----

The Government was warned two years ago.

Please, Deputy McGrath.

-----or not to build the project.

The Tánaiste's time is up.

Nobody is suggesting that we can build this hospital for less than it currently costs-----

It is in the wrong place.

-----but there are certainly lessons to learn that the Government needs to act on.

I do not know if clocks are read differently in Cork but the reality is that time is prescribed here for questions. Can we please ask the question in the time allowed and answer the question in the time allowed?

Can the Tánaiste state with certainty that this will stay within €2 billion? The idea that it is a gross underestimation does not reflect what the report is saying. The report is saying there was a complete absence of control, incoherence, lack of information, red flags, poor governance and so on. It is similar to other projects. The Government has not learned. With regard to the broadband plan, €550 million is going to go to €2 billion or €3 billion depending on how it is calculated. It has happened with the event centre in Cork. The lesson is that when the Government tells everybody that this project has to happen without due diligence, everybody, including developers, knows they have the Government where they want it.

That is why a former Minister chased down one of the tenderers for broadband desperately to get them over the line because politically the Government has to get them over the line. The costs soar out of control.

It is in the interests of the people.

The same happened here, there is no control. No one is asking any questions at Cabinet level. I asked the Tánaiste about the letter from the Department of Health of May 2017. What led to that change of governance structure? Why was a new governance structure required? Is it still the Government's position that no one raised these red flags at any stage-----

It was warned by the board in 2017.

-----with the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform or with the Minister for Health? Is that still the Government's position, that right up to December no one raised this? We know the Minister was told in the summer but apparently he told nobody. He told no one in the Cabinet that this thing had ballooned out of control and the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform says that no one told him, not even the senior public procurement officer. All we heard on radio last night and today are the Ministers of State. The senior Ministers have gone missing on this project-----

They have gone into the hole.

-----and will not be accountable for it.

The Minister for Health is before a committee as we speak answering questions on whatever people want to ask him. Senior Ministers have not gone missing. I do not have the detail on the May 2017 letter the Deputy refers to but I can get that for him.

I think the public does want to understand what went wrong here. From my initial reading of this report the explanation is pretty clear. Whether through incompetence or something else there was a gross underestimate of what it was going to cost to build a project of this scale, type and complexity. There should have been red flags earlier in the system.

There should have been questions on it.

There were not and we need to learn lessons from that.

That is the duty of Cabinet.

It was warned in 2017.

It is not just about announcements. It has to govern.

Both Ministers will be coming to Cabinet within a month and I presume will come to this House too-----

They have to.

-----with an implementation plan for all of the recommendations of this report. That is what Government does, it learns lessons.

This Government announces things.

It is not true to say that the mistakes that were made in this project have been repeated over and over with other projects. The Deputy is trying to link it with other projects that he does not even know the detail of in respect of the national broadband plan, for example.

The Tánaiste does not know it either.

I do not know what the final cost is so I do not know how the Deputy does-----

Exactly. That is the point.

The Taoiseach was the Minister for Health.

The Tánaiste is clueless.

Nobody knows.

-----because there has not been a Government decision on it.

The process has not concluded but the Opposition is already trying to turn it into a political football.

The Taoiseach is outlining escalating costs. The Taoiseach is-----

When people are in a hole they have to stop digging.

If we consider projects that have been completed-----

Would the Deputies let him speak?

-----from the N17, the Gort to Tuam bypass, Arklow to Rathnew bypass, the north docklands sewerage scheme and the Phoenix Park tunnel, these are all projects that were completed on time and on budget.

The Phoenix Park tunnel was built 150 years ago. It was reopened.

This Government, unlike Deputy Martin's, has a pretty good record actually-----

Yes, hear, hear.

This Government cannot take credit for the Phoenix Park tunnel.

-----of delivering projects on time and on budget.

Who is judging?

Time, time.

This is an exception to that and that is why we have asked PwC to look at it in detail and we are factoring in the lessons learned from that report-----

It is exception after exception.

There are two exceptions there worth about €5 billion.

-----and will report back in a month.