The new national children's hospital will be a game-changer for the children of Ireland. It will be a fantastic, world-class hospital. It will nearly double surgical capacity and provide the best modern care, which the children of Ireland need and deserve. I want to see this hospital built and opened as soon as possible. I think that is in everyone's interest and it is what the children of Ireland deserve, but the long-running saga of the new children's hospital, a fiasco, it has to be said, from the start, has now descended into farce. There is no certainty about a final cost or a final completion date. There has been no honesty about the scale of the challenges we are facing with this project. We learned this week that the board has reached the end of the road on its original budget. It is looking for hundreds of millions of euro more from the Government to continue this project without any indication of what the final cost will be or when this hospital might open. All the while, 100,000 children are languishing on hospital waiting lists.

The Government has made promises time and again, which the Tánaiste has reiterated, to children with scoliosis that they will get the care they need within four months, but many, as he knows, are still waiting for years. These children need this hospital built and opened as soon as possible.

When the Taoiseach, Deputy Varadkar, was Minister for Health, he said he committed to opening the hospital by 2020 "unless an asteroid hits Earth". In 2019, when releasing a damning PwC report that found major underestimations of cost and extremely poor governance, the Taoiseach said it was his priority to meet the 2023 opening date. It then became March 2024 and in the past few weeks, it changed again to May 2024. Yesterday, astoundingly, the board could give no indication or certainty on when the hospital would be handed over. I have no confidence that this hospital will be open and ready to treat patients in 2024. I think it is a certainty now that it will be 2025, and God knows when in that year.

The board and the contractor are now openly at war and all the while, the costs are rising. This is in nobody's interest. It does nothing to help the children who need this hospital built. It is unseemly and unprofessional and it does not inspire confidence that the Government can deliver this project on time and in cost. We need action from the Tánaiste's Government. We need urgency and we need leadership. What we need now is not more fictitious timeframes or costs. Every timeframe we have been given has come and gone, and all we can see - all taxpayers can see - is more cheques being written, more money being spent, more delays and more cost overruns. We need a real date, we need a real timeframe and we need to do everything possible to ensure this project is brought back on track.

There is a responsibility on the Minister for Health, who is sitting next to the Tánaiste, to get off the sidelines and show leadership, knock heads together and ensure the board and BAM are doing everything possible to make sure this project comes in on time. I am sure the Tánaiste would accept we cannot simply continue to write cheques with no guarantees. Is the Government going to commit more money to this project without any certainty on a completion date? Exactly how much additional funding has been sought by the board, beyond the €1.7 billion already committed?

First, I agree with the Deputy that the new children's hospital will be transformative when completed and will represent a significant step change in tertiary care for children in this country. The opening of the two satellite centres has already had an impact. I visited the site last year when I was Taoiseach and there is a greater degree of completion now than there was some years ago. Since the Government came into office, it has had a very clear focus on the hospital. That focus is about getting the hospital complete but also getting value for money and ensuring there is a rigorous process in terms of cost. I respect the Deputy's right, of course, to raise these issues on a continuing basis - that is his job as Opposition spokesperson - but in the public debate and the history of this entire project, in terms of the politicisation of the hospital or issues around cost and so on, we have to be careful we are not playing into somebody else's hands. I have been adamant from the outset, when I became Taoiseach two and a half years ago, that we had to follow a rigorous process here.

Yes, there is no question there have been tensions. There has been a real difficulty here and perhaps one would not start out again if one were starting to build a new hospital. The last thing we should ever do in regard to public contracts is start putting costs out there. We should tender and see what comes in. Claims are being made now but the claims are being challenged every step of the way, and that is right. There should not be compromise on contesting those claims. I mean that, and if that means delay, so be it. Just 2% is the outturn of all the claims made so far, because they are being contested through mediation. We could cut corners and say let us not contest these claims and give more, to hurry up and accelerate the completion, but that game is over. That is not going to happen and it has not happened over the past two and a half years. The contractors have responsibilities, as does the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board. It is charged with delivering this project. Painful and unsatisfactory as it is in terms of completion timeframes, we need to stick with the process and not create leverage for anybody to see weaknesses on the State side whereby the State is somehow going to compromise its position in a mad political rush to get this completed because it might not look well if we do not get it completed before a certain timeframe.

I do not approve of that approach at all. We have to be hard and fair. We want the hospital to be completed, but if claims are being made that are not sustainable, they have to be tested. That means arbitration and mediation, and that is slow. Covid-19 and various issues have delayed the project. By definition, every building project in the past two years has gone up in costs, as we know through housing and everything else. Those costs are going to feed their way into the children's hospital, as will costs caused by delay. From our perspective, we want the hospital built. It will be transformative when it is built for children's quality of care and the physical environment of children's care. We just have to stick with it. The development board is working with the contractors to get this done, all the time making sure, from the point of view of the public interest, that value for money is a key priority, that there is cost containment and that we do not just surrender to every claim made.

I have even less confidence after that contribution, it has to be said. First, I did not put completion dates out there; you did-----

I did not.

The Tánaiste's Government did. Ministers were saying-----

I never said anything.

Excuse me, I am putting questions to the Tánaiste. His Ministers, including the one sitting next to him, were talking about March of next year as a completion date and then the Department of Health was saying it could be May. I did not put those dates out there. The board did and they were reiterated by the Minister. Previous dates were stated by previous Ministers as well.

On costs, the Tánaiste's Government approved the total programme cost of €1.7 billion, and we now know the board is looking for hundreds of millions of euro more. The Tánaiste is saying the days of throwing more money at this project are gone. Will he wake up and see what is happening? Is he seriously telling me the Government is not going to give any more money to this project? That is not what we are being told by the board.

My understanding is this will go to Cabinet. Before any more taxpayers' money is handed over, will the Government guarantee there will be a completion date that is real and realistic, not fictitious?

Let us get this hospital built. This is not about anybody playing politics. This is about making sure this hospital is built for the children who need it.

With respect, I never said anything about anybody not getting additional funding. The Deputy just said that I did. That is untrue. Do not be putting words into my mouth. The Deputy came out two weeks ago about sources he had saying that remedial works needed to be carried out. In the public interest the Deputy should reveal the sources.

He was right.

What is the secret?

There is no secret.

If someone comes to the Deputy and says that he or she has information-----

We did put it into the public domain.

No. The Deputy should put the source in. Who came to the Deputy?

The Tánaiste throws whistleblowers under the bus.

Through the Chair if I may-----

The Tánaiste has a history of throwing whistleblowers under the bus. My party does not.

I am answering the Deputy's question. I am simply saying that in the public interest. There are lots of agendas here. I am not talking about the Deputy now. I am talking about the cost of this. We must protect, as best we can, the taxpayer. I never gave a date on this. The reason I did not give a date is that I am aware of the tensions between the contractor and the hospital development board, which have been there for a number of years. There is no secret about that. There is a way to deal with this and it is not in the public glare of big grandstanding statements-----

I am not grandstanding at all. I am doing my job.

It is in the nitty-gritty and the daily grind of contesting the claims that are being made and testing them objectively, and then doing the best on behalf of the taxpayer.

And the Government has failed in all of that.

Can we stop the heckling please?