Deputy Varadkar said that short of an asteroid hitting the planet, the national children's hospital would be built for €700 million by 2020. Here we are, with €2.2 billion spent, and it is still not built. A total of €300 million has been spent on metro north and not a shovel has been put in the ground. Ventilators costing €22 million that did not work were bought by the Government during the Covid period. It is costing €50,000 a year just to store them. One hundred electric buses bought by Dublin Bus did not move an inch for a year and a half because somebody did not put in a planning application for an electric charger.

There were 107,000 adverse incidents last year in the health service. That is 107,000 accidents that have damaged individuals. In five years, 3,140 people lost their lives in the health service due to adverse incidents. The State has spent €2.5 billion in compensation as a result of adverse incidents in the past ten years. Nobody was held to account. I once asked a civil servant who was in front of the health committee whether, in his whole experience of the Department and the HSE, he had ever known of somebody losing his or her job because of an adverse incident, even up to the loss of life. He said he had never seen it in his time.

Then we had the cyberattack on the HSE, which cost €100 million and will necessitate €650 million of security upgrades. In human costs, thousands of people have lost healthcare treatment and have suffered significantly in those terms. A total of 473 lawsuits are lining up now because of the cyberattack. The investigation that happened subsequently found that the HSE was operating a frail IT system and did not have the resources or the expertise to support it. Interestingly, the National Cyber Security Centre had a budget of €5 million the year the cyberattack happened. To put that in context, the Taoiseach's office spent €15 million on press statements the same year. The National Cyber Security Centre did not have a director or a premises that year. Nobody was ever held to account for that.

In the case of CervicalCheck, the Government promised in this Chamber that no woman would ever have to go to court because of the damage done to her. Currently, 400 women are going to court to achieve justice for what happened to them. Incredibly, 85% of cervical samples are still being sent abroad for checking, with nobody held to account.

Children are going missing from Tusla special emergency accommodation that is not properly regulated. Some of them have been exposed to sexual exploitation. Nobody has ever been held to account.

The Gucci bike shed in front of Leinster House is a microcosm of the L'Oréal attitude of this Government that "We are worth it". Again, where will the accountability be? Lessons will be learned and a report will be published just when everybody else has moved on. When will we see individual responsibility? When will there be a cost for decisions such as this that cost the country so much? Who signed off on the Government bike shed and what rank were they within the OPW?

The Deputy has raised a very important point with regard to accountability and value for money. Thankfully, the State, due to the hard work of the 2.75 million people in employment, is running a budget surplus. We continue to do that. We are investing in significant infrastructural projects and will continue to move forward projects such as metro north, as the Deputy mentioned, which is crucially important for the east coast region and Dublin in particular.

Yesterday, the Ceann Comhairle dealt with how we all feel about the example of really poor management and lack of accountability in regard to the now infamous bike shed on Merrion lawn. We all abhor that. It frustrates and angers people. It angers me, too. Certainly, we need accountability. I served five years as Vice Chairperson of the Committee of Public Accounts. I saw that committee do its job and I see the current committee do its job. It has the function of bringing people in and looking into, and being the watchdog on, expenditure. Every Department, as well as its Minister, Ministers of State and Secretary General, has responsibilities in the management of its budget. I cannot give the Deputy an answer directly in the particular example he raised as to who sanctioned it. I expect to hear that. We should know that. We should also know what process was followed and how in God's name someone thought that to spend €336,000 on a bike rack was something that would be permissible. No one in their right mind would actually think that. I take it as well that it is not just that one instance. It is an example of where people believe, in certain instances, that the hard-earned tax they have paid has been wasted. I believe in this instance it has been.

We need accountability. We have mechanisms within this House. We are all accountable as Teachtaí Dála to our constituents. We go up for election every four or five years and the people will vote for us or they will not. It is a democratic Chamber and a democratic Republic. Within the structures of the Civil Service, where expenditure like this is made and decisions like that are made, there has to be accountability. There is accountability to the House. The Ceann Comhairle has called for that. I expect that the Committee of Public Accounts will be involved and will discuss it. The chairperson of the OPW must be involved. There should be no secret on this. People deserve to know.

Regarding the provision of the children's hospital, it is a crucial piece of infrastructure for our children that will last for decades. There is no question that there has been a less than satisfactory history with regard to some of the expenditure on it but we need that facility. If we look back at how it was established in the first instance, how the contract was broken up led to the problems, including the ground works being done separately. That is my own belief. We need that facility opened. We need our kids to be looked after in a world-class facility, which it will be.

I support the Deputy in his call for accountability. No Deputy in this House would disagree with that.

I will give another couple of examples. The Minister for Justice promised there would be a policing review after the Dublin riots. It does not exist anymore. There are 4,000 empty local authority homes at the moment. It takes eight months for them to be returned to the market. It takes three weeks for a private rental home to be returned to the market. A planning application has not even gone in for the flood defences that were promised in Midleton in 2017. Some €20 million was spent on pointless referendums where Ministers blatantly misled the public. The M50 bridges were built for £53 million. Commuters are still paying billions of euro for those bridges.

The reality is that this Government is an accountability-free zone. We are cursed to wake up to a Groundhog Day of incompetence unless there is change in this regard. Accountability means there is a cost to an individual. We see all the reports and the meetings of the Committee of Public Accounts. However, unless there is a cost to individuals for making decisions that are wrong or where they are not fulfilling their job contracts, this is going to happen over and over again. I asked the Minister what accountability looks like to him. How will it be implemented? The reality is that the buck stops with the Government. The Minister is right that if we do not see accountability here, there will be accountability in the ballot box.

There have been many advances in this country. I do not want the Deputy's depiction to stand that everything is wrong and everything is broken; it is not. Let us be straight on that first. If we look at the vast improvement over decades in infrastructure-----

Everything is grinding to a halt. The Minister has to admit that.

The Deputy can assist in this regard. All Deputies have a responsibility in this. The reason for most of the delays in some of our largest infrastructural projects is planning. It is objections, delays, judicial reviews, protests - all of those things.

There is no staff in the planning-----

The Deputy will have an opportunity to speak eloquently here about his frustration with delays and cost overruns. He will have an opportunity within two or three weeks to either vote for or against the Planning and Development Bill, which will make a massive difference-----

Staff the planning departments.

-----in streamlining our planning system. In many instances, though not all, cost overruns are caused by delays in planning or objections. We cannot continue to see that if we need to deliver, which we do, significant infrastructural projects like, as the Deputy mentioned, metro north and others. We need a planning system and planning legislation that underpins that, so I-----

Not even a planning application has gone in in Midleton.

It probably would be objected to.