Digestible form.

I call Deputy Mick Wallace.

The Tánaiste says the PwC report gives us a clear explanation of what happened here. I do not agree. The children's hospital problems are about construction contracts, cost management, cost measurement and general construction. I am wondering why the Government gave a crowd of accountants, who know nothing about construction, the job of reviewing it. Why did it not engage a construction and procurement lawyer with international experience and a top professional quantity surveying team from outside the State? Was the Government afraid it might not like the answer?

In the introduction to the report, PwC states that the scope of its work was limited to a review of documentary evidence made available to it and interviews with selected stakeholders and project personnel. It states that PwC has taken reasonable steps to check the accuracy of information provided to it but "we have not independently verified all of the information provided to us relating to the services". That is not to talk about the stuff they did not get. This is not an independent report; the authors are saying so themselves.

There is the answer.

The Tánaiste is calling this a special project but it is not actually a very special project. It is a construction project; it is not unique. Hospitals get built every year across Europe. It does not justify an extra €450 million. The report states that the board should be less reliant on external advisers. If the Government is going to hire consultants and pay them, maybe it might hold them to account. I am sure the consultants have professional indemnity. I would be very surprised if the Government hired consultants who did not have that. If the legal people gave poor advice, they should be held to account. What was the legal advice regarding the contract? How did the board deal with the legal advice? The likes of Tim Bouchier-Hayes and Tom Costello were put on the board for their professional competence. Were they competent? The Taoiseach talks of the cost of delays, higher building standards, and the knock-on effect of VAT. Delays and changes are meant to managed. That is what people are paid for. There is always risk involved but the risk should be transferred onto the contractor. The contractor builds that into his price. Why did the price go up? Construction costs have gone up but not by €450 million.

The scary part is that we are only at the start of it. We have not got to the complicated part yet. It has gone up, it is out of proportion and the Government does not know where it is going, where it is going to land or what it is going to finally cost. The Government has the wrong contract in place and is refusing to revisit it. It is a terrible mistake not to revisit this. On page 25 of the report, PwC says that the Government should not revisit the contract. However, the report gives no evidence to back that up. There is no analysis of why it would not make sense to revisit it. PwC tells us that retendering the works would also require the replacement contractor to take on the basement and subsequent structural works and that it would create a number of contractual and legal challenges. It would not. That is nonsense. If I was building a 100-storey building, I would subcontract the piler. The piles would go in. I would not be putting them in; someone else would be putting them in. I would get them tested independently. That is what one does with piles. The contractors would have professional indemnity to back up where they were coming from. This does not make any sense. The Government needs to revisit it, as it is ridiculous.

I do not think anybody is defending the process that was followed here because it has clearly resulted in a whole series of failings that have been pointed out in this report.

The Government was told two years ago.

The issue is what we do about it now. I do not believe, having read this report, that we can reduce the cost of building a national children's hospital by retendering at this stage. I know Deputy Wallace has been consistent in contesting that and I respect his view. PwC specifically tries to deal with this issue in the report. When the Deputy tells me that when we pay money for consultants to do a professional job, we expect them to do it properly, I would respond that I expect PwC to have done this review properly.

They have not got the expertise.

When PwC makes a clear recommendation that retendering would likely see an increase in cost or perhaps the hospital not being built at all, we have to take note and that is what we are doing. The Government is not going to shy away from the other failings that are clearly pointed to in this report.

The Government has had it for a month.

We will change procedures on the back of this in respect of the mistakes that were made, primarily around the underestimation of cost. As someone who has been involved in the building industry, Deputy Wallace will understand the failings that happened there. There should have been red flags earlier in this process to highlight the fact that there were clear failings in the estimate of costs.

The Government knew in March 2017.

When those failings were flagged, the Minister responded by asking for more detail at the end of last summer. When he received the extra details, he came to Cabinet with a series of choices for the Government to make. When this report is read, it becomes clear that the choice we made in December, to move ahead with this project even though it was clearly going to cost a lot more, was the right choice.

History will not be kind to this Government.

Would the Deputy listen to-----

The Government was warned in March 2017.

The Deputy is not interested in answers.

I am interested in answers, but not in waffle.

He wants to push himself into every story.

I have been in this story since the start. This has been going on since 2015.

I suggest the Deputy reads the report. He probably has not done so yet.

Reading the report would be a waste of time. PwC has no expertise.

We do not want to confuse the Deputy with facts.

This is Deputy Wallace's question. Deputy Mattie McGrath should try to contain himself.

This is a serious project and this Government is determined to deliver it. Mistakes were made in terms of the tendering process and the estimate process that gave a false picture of what this was going to cost. We have to ensure that this project concludes in a way that does not involve a significant increase in costs beyond where we are today. The work that the Minister for Health, Deputy Harris, and in particular the Minister for Finance, Deputy Donohoe, will be doing in the next month will help to ensure that is the case.

I do not accept that PwC is in a position to say that this should not be revisited, and I do not see the evidence for that in its report. It has not given us the evidence and has not done the necessary work. It was not the correct organisation to review this. It addressed the peer review issue by saying: "An external perspective, frequently in the form of a peer review, is often needed to help identify potential weaknesses and to provide assurances to the various levels of governance." That is another way of saying that people on the board did not have the competency to mark the design team. Who made the decision that there was to be no peer review team? We need to know.

The Tánaiste has said that there was a gross underestimation that should have been flagged earlier. Public benchmarking is an advanced estimation of what works would cost. I asked a question about whether public benchmarking was done for this project. I was told that no construction benchmarking exercise was carried out prior to the issuing of tenders in 2016. That is unheard of for a project such as this. Who made that decision? Is anyone going to be held to account? I do not understand that. I was provided with the spend on advisers on this project from 2013 to 2019. The quantity surveyors Bruce Shaw got €9.9 million. What has it done? Mr. Robert Watt appeared before the Committee on Public Accounts and said that his Department was given commitments relating to the approximate bill of quantities that underpinned the contract and the accuracy of those estimates. They did not turn out to be accurate. Who gave those commitments? Why will nobody answer these questions? The bill of quantities for the second stage was based on a preliminary design. That is nuts. It is not done in the engineering industry. It is supposed to be based on a detailed design. It is unheard of. Was the board competent? Was the legal advice good? Was it wrong? Is McCann FitzGerald going to be held to account?

The Government must be thanking its lucky stars that the world is currently being exercised by the spending of €100,000 which is being discussed at the Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport. We have given PwC €450,000 and it has not provided an adequate report as far as I am concerned. We are looking at a loss of €500 million here if the issue is not revisited. I am convinced that this project can be completed for much less. The biggest problem now is that we do not know how high the price will go. The price is estimated at a certain level at the moment, but it will rise way beyond that price. If the final price rises above €2.05 billion it will be the most expensive hospital ever built in the world. It makes no sense not to revisit it.

The Deputy has said many times that we should re-tender and that we would save a fortune that way. I do not see the evidence to back that up. We have a report that was only published yesterday. We will now focus on putting a plan together to deliver on the recommendations of that report. Many of the questions the Deputy has asked are perfectly valid, including how the design team got this so badly wrong, including some of the companies to which the Deputy referred. The recommendation in the report of the need to challenge robustly design teams and stakeholders in projects such as this on an ongoing basis through to project delivery is something we need to factor in to the future management of projects and indeed tendering. That is what is going to happen as we put a plan together in the next month to deliver on the recommendations of this report. Many of the issues the Deputy is frustrated by are real and genuine. Many are consistent with what PwC has pointed to in this report. The Government now has to respond to that and make sure we learn the lessons.