The debacle surrounding the construction of the national children's hospital continues. At the weekend, we learned that the hospital's completion date will be missed yet again. We are now looking at a completion date of 2026, and we cannot even be sure of that. A report from KPMG published this morning calls into question whether the hospital will be ready to open even when it is built. There are fears about gaps in staffing and senior leadership teams and a lack of clarity regarding the future operating model and resourcing of the hospital.

On the watch of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, the biggest investment in health infrastructure in the history of the State has descended into complete farce, with never-ending delays, an ever-growing massive overspend and zero accountability. Nobody in government can say for certain when the hospital will open its doors or what the final bill for the taxpayer will be. This fiasco is rooted in Government incompetence. It was the Taoiseach, Deputy Harris, who gave the go-ahead for the contract with BAM in 2017. In 2019, despite the major concerns and problems that had emerged, he again gave the developer his seal of approval by signing the contract for phase 2 of construction. This is the source of all of the problems that have beset the building of the hospital.

There have been weak contracts that do not protect the public purse, do not hold the developer to delivery dates and do not allow for effective oversight of the project. Who signs a contract for anything, let alone a hospital, without an idea of what the final cost will be or when the job will be finished? The answer to that question is the Taoiseach, Deputy Harris. Yesterday, he said that the Government will not be a pushover on the children's hospital. Of course, that is just another sound bite. The horse has truly bolted on that score.

Let us go through this. The completion date has been delayed 17 times. The spending on the hospital has ballooned by €1.5 billion. According to the board overseeing the project, not one of the hospital's 5,000 rooms has been completed to the standard set out in the contract. Most importantly, the hospital is still not open. Not a single child has been treated there, despite the billions of public money spent. That is not a Government being pushed over; it is a Government being rolled over repeatedly. Is é Simon Harris agus an Rialtas atá freagrach as an bpraiseach a bhaineann le hospidéal náisiúnta na bpáistí.

Everybody in the Dáil wants the hospital finished. We want its doors open for children. The scandal of children with scoliosis and spina bifida waiting years in agony for their operations remains front and centre. The hospital should be open for them and for so many other children in need of care and treatment. Of course, BAM must step up to the plate and fulfil all contractual obligations. Let us be clear, however. It is the job of the Government to protect the public interest. When it comes to the delays and ballooning costs, the buck stops with the Government. Can the Minister tell us what the Government is doing to ensure that it does not continue to be a pushover? What is it doing to stop the massive cost overruns? What is it doing to ensure that this hospital gets built and opens?

I thank Deputy McDonald for raising this issue. Week after week in the Dáil, she and other Deputies, including Government Deputies, raise the ongoing concerns relating to the need to meet the healthcare needs of sick young girls and boys and the improvement we have to make to how healthcare is provided to our youngest. That is why the national children's hospital is so important and why its completion, including the provision of surgery facilities, additional care facilities and bedrooms, is fundamental to how we can, in a far better way, rise to the challenge of meeting the healthcare needs of our youngest. That is why this hospital is needed and why, when it is open, it will make a massive difference to our ability to meet the healthcare needs of our youngest, particularly those with the most difficult and sensitive healthcare needs.

The message from the Government regarding where the project stands is clear. We want the hospital open as soon as possible, with the rooms and surgery facilities completed. We want to see a building that is currently a structure turn into a hospital providing state-of-the-art care to those who need it most. The progress on this hospital has been delayed, as the Deputy said. On the recent track record of delays relating to the project, due to decisions made by the contractor, in the past four years the project has been delayed 14 times. In the past 12 months alone, it has been delayed four times.

Deputy McDonald asked what the Government is doing about this and what steps it is taking to ensure that the hospital is completed and can meet the healthcare needs of our children. The National Paediatric Hospital Development Board, which is responsible for the oversight of the hospital, is acting on behalf of the Government in respect of the project. On our behalf, the board is taking the necessary steps to ensure the contractor is held to account and to get the hospital open as soon as possible. The board is challenging the contractor on costs and taking the right action to challenge the delays and ensure the right amount of resources are present on site to ensure the hospital opens. The delays that are taking place at the moment are unacceptable. The Government wants to see the hospital open. The board is acting on our behalf to take the steps necessary to allow it to open and to be turned from a building into a hospital that gives care to those who need it most.

On the charges Deputy McDonald made about the Taoiseach and the Government, on one hand, she says she wants us to better meet the healthcare needs of the young and, on the other, she is always against everything that relates to this hospital. She says she has great concerns about the way the costs have gone up, but when the Government takes any steps to deal with those costs, she is critical of that. She says she wants to see the hospital open as soon as possible, but when we take the steps needed to lead to the hospital opening, she stands up in the Dáil and criticises that as well. It is the same old Sinn Féin. We see it again in what she has said today. When you are against everything, you are for nothing.

Yet again, we see not just a grossly incompetent Government, but one that is entirely unprepared to take responsibility, much less to be accountable, for anything. It is the board's fault. It is the contractor's fault. Of course, it is Sinn Féin's fault. How could it not be?

Let me recite this again. On 17 occasions, the completion date has fallen through. There is an overspend of €1.5 billion. According to the CEO of the board, not a single room has been completed to the required standard in this project. That is his account of things. Most importantly, the hospital is not open and not one child has been treated.

I asked the Minister a direct question. I asked him what he and the Government, as the custodians of the public purse and the people ultimately accountable, are doing to provide access to this healthcare for our children? I can only surmise from his response that the Government is, in fact, doing nothing.

Hear, hear.

Having signed weak contracts with very weak levers available to the board-----

Thank you, Deputy, the time is up.

-----the Government has sat back and allowed this farce and fiasco to deepen.

Hear, hear.

It does not matter what answer I give to the House. It does not matter how I look to answer Deputy McDonald today. Her response is always going to be the same - to find any answer insufficient and to find any evidence of progress or an attempt to deal with the issue not good enough. I outlined in my answer to her that we do not accept as sufficient or satisfactory where this project stands and that we, too, want to see the hospital open as soon as possible. I have acknowledged at other points, and I do so again today, all the difficulties and learnings we have had in regard to the cost of the hospital, which have been acknowledged and taken on board in how we cost other projects.

The Deputy asked me what the Government is doing in this regard. I explained what it is doing. I pointed out that the Government, through the development board that has responsibility for the hospital, is taking the action that is needed in respect of the timeliness of delivery of this project, the challenge of claims and the work we are doing and what we are demanding of the developer to have that work done. I put it to Deputy McDonald that rather than continually coming in here and doing the work on behalf of the contractor, she would be better off making the case for this project being completed, supporting the children of Ireland and getting this hospital complete.

I want to ask about political accountability for what is happening with the children's hospital or, rather, what is not happening. I read the coverage of the letter sent by the Minister, Deputy Donnelly, to the Taoiseach about the latest delays relating to the building of the new hospital. Perhaps that correspondence could more accurately be described as a letter from the Minister to the RTÉ newsroom, copied to the Taoiseach. Clearly, there are questions to be asked and answered about the purpose of that letter and why a letter was needed between two Cabinet colleagues who presumably speak to each other frequently. Regardless, we are led to understand from the text of the letter that the Minister is very angry at the continued delays to this vital infrastructure.

The Minister is not alone. We are all angry. We all want to see the children's hospital built. However, it is not for the Minister for Health or, indeed, the Minister, Deputy Donohoe, to be angry about or to take offence at these issues like bystanders. It is simply not good enough for the Minister opposite to comment, as he has just done, that the delay is unacceptable, as if the Government has no role, oversight or accountability. The job of the Government and the Minister for Health is to take charge of this and ensure that the hospital is built, rather than engaging in what seems to be a sort of unedifying psychodrama played out in letters to the press.

With an endless litany of delays and cost overruns, people are losing faith in the Government's capacity to deliver major public projects. We will not be able to see the sun soon for all the kites being flown above Government Buildings in advance of the budget. None of those kites ever seems to result in delivery, either of the children's hospital or other much-needed projects, including the homes that need to be built and the upgrades to public transport that are so badly required. I am thinking of the Taoiseach's recent kite-flying about a new Department for infrastructure. Respectfully, it seems to many of us that the Minister's Department, namely the Department of public expenditure and reform, should be delivering infrastructure. That is what his Department is for. Indeed, it has questions to answer about the cost overruns and delays in the children's hospital. I recall previous concerns raised about why the chief procurement officer, who sat on the board of the hospital, did not inform the Minister about cost overruns some years ago when this first started to become an issue.

Beyond the cost overruns, there are other serious issues. A leaked report today from KPMG questions the capacity of Children's Health Ireland to run the hospital whenever it is finally built, which is partly attributed to the extraordinary delays in construction. It appears that there is blame lying with the developer, BAM. Again, we in the Opposition have to ask what the Government will do about those delays. What is the Minister for Health going to do? What did his predecessor, the Taoiseach, do? What did the Taoiseach's predecessor, Deputy Varadkar, do?

What does Deputy Donohoe propose to do, as public expenditure Minister? Will he protect public procurement from third parties that lowball cost estimates at tender stage and then continually revise figures upwards? Can he say now when the children's hospital will be delivered and how much it will cost?

In the Deputy's question to me, she made reference to all the other projects that are under way across our country, whether it be homes or the delivery of public transport. In many cases, the delivery of capital projects by this Government happens in the way the public wants and happens on time. Despite the surge in inflation we have seen in recent years, many of these projects do happen in line with the expectations we have for their cost. I have already acknowledged all the difficulties as regards the delivery of this hospital, the change in cost and its delay and will do so again. I have stated what we have learned from it and, for projects of this scale, what we are now doing differently as regards our tendering and procurement processes. The fact is that we have completely different processes in place now for other big projects of scale, like our metro and the national broadband plan, that reflect the learnings we have had-----

The Government could not build a henhouse.

-----from the delivery of the children's hospital.

Deputy Bacik asks what steps the Government is taking to ensure this hospital is delivered. As she rightly says, the most important thing now is how we learn from what has happened, how we get the hospital open and how we get it providing care to sick young children. What steps are we taking in this regard? Two main steps are being taken. First, as regards the cost of the hospital, the board of the national children's hospital, acting on behalf of the Government, continues to challenge claims that are put in as regards costs being accrued in the delivery of the hospital and is successful in getting better value and better outcomes for the taxpayer in challenging many of those costs. As to what we are doing for the timeliness of the hospital's delivery, the board has the ability to withhold certain payments to the contractor in order to ensure that timelines are delivered even at this point. This is something the board does and continues to consider doing in the future to ensure we get closer to the point of the hospital being open and children receiving the healthcare they need and deserve.

Clearly, children need this hospital built. We all need and want to see it built. We want to see it open and delivering the necessary services. It is just not good enough, however, for Deputy Donohoe, as Minister for public expenditure, or for the health Minister to simply say what the board is doing and not to reassure people what the Government is doing to ensure an outcome here. I think what is frustrating people is the lack of outcome, the lack of accountability and the constant impression of passing the buck and blaming others for cost overruns and delays.

There is here a pattern. The health Minister is the Government line Minister who is politically responsible and accountable for the spend in health, but every time another health scandal or cost overrun hits the headlines, the health Minister is nowhere to be seen. When the cost-saving recruitment embargo transformed into a suppression strategy, whereby 2,000 vacant posts are being quietly abolished, the health Minister was nowhere to be seen. When that embargo was debated earlier this year, it was more often than not the former Taoiseach who went out to bat for it. The annual health budget has become a joke; it is such a fiction. Yet every day we see hundreds of people still on trolleys waiting for beds, childhoods spent on waiting lists, crowded accident and emergency departments and appalling tragedies like the awful death of Aoife Johnston.

It is not good enough to say what the board is doing; what we want to hear is what the Government is doing to ensure this hospital will open.

The board is a representative of the State here. The board is taking action on behalf of the Government. The Deputy knows well that that is the case. She is making a claim regarding the Government not being involved in this despite the fact that the board of the hospital is acting on behalf of the Government.

As regards the charges the Deputy made regarding the performance of our health services at the moment, what she neglected to say in the charges she made against the Minister, Deputy Donnelly, and the Government is that 2023 was the second year in a row in which waiting lists fell for key procedures in our hospitals, we have seen a reduction of almost one third in the waiting times for really important procedures and we see a reduction in outpatient waiting lists, despite the big increase we see in the demand for healthcare in the aftermath of the pandemic.

That is our record on healthcare. The Minister for Health, Deputy Donnelly, has been instrumental in the delivery of those improvements, just as he has been in the agreement we have reached regarding the better funding of healthcare services in Ireland for this year and next year.

In each of the answers I have given to the Dáil this afternoon on this topic, I have acknowledged what should have gone better in relation to this hospital, my role in it and what we have done to try to fix it for the future and ensure learnings are learnt in this regard. I have also emphasised the steps the Government is taking to minimise cost at this stage and to get the hospital open as soon as possible.