Eilis O’Hanlon,

The search for scapegoats over the cost of the new children’s hospital has taken the wrong direction, writes Eilis O’Hanlon

IT’S a curious thing that whenever there is rising consternation about some public project that’s gone ludicrously wrong, the person who ends up carrying the can for it is rarely a government minister.

Instead the search for scapegoats invariably ends up honing in on someone that few ordinary voters have ever heard of, and whose departure they must simply take on trust that it will immediately make things better. The latest to fit the pattern is Tom Costello, chair of the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board (NPHDB) for the past six years.

After another week of criticism of a project whose costs have rocketed to nearly €1.7bn, he announced his resignation in a statement yesterday, citing his concern at the “reputational damage that the ongoing commentary about the increased cost of the hospital is having on this critically important project”. It comes just a day after Health Minister Simon Harris (inset) reassured detractors that there would be “accountability” and “personnel changes” in how the project is being run. It’s almost as if he knew something in advance about Mr Costello’s impending resignation.

The now former chair of NPHDB is, no doubt, a household name in his chosen field. According to his biography on the new children’s hospital website, Mr Costello is a chartered engineer and Fellow of Engineers Ireland, and, as a former managing director of Sisk’s Irish operation, he did oversee “the successful completion of many of the largest and most significant projects built in Ireland”, including Dundrum Town Centre.

He must have sounded like an ideal fit to bring the new children’s hospital in on time and on budget. That obviously failed to happen and, since it’s now feared that costs will eventually exceed €2bn, he surely knew what was expected of him, especially after a week in which he’d faced mounting personal criticism for his role. His resignation is many things, but a surprise isn’t one of them. The NPHDB does have statutory responsibility for building and equipping the hospital, after all. The buck might not necessarily stop there, but the winding road to wherever the buck stops certainly goes through there en route.

But that’s an altogether different matter to the one which really counts — namely, who is actually to blame for the fiasco? Who knows? All we do know is that Tom Costello satisfies the inevitable requirement in this age of news management to provide a resignation to make it seem as if those at the top are in control.

Casual onlookers are meant to see the headlines, presume the culprit has been found who wasted all their money, and then get on with their lives, content that justice has been done. Only a spoilsport would upset the choreography by pointing out that, no matter how high-ranking a role it may be to act as chair of the development board on a project of this size and importance, it’s not as if the Government just handed him a book of blank cheques.

There’s a long and complex chain of command in place; there are many people to answer to, as well as regular assessments, meetings, updates, reviews. Plenty of people are in the know, most of them equally anonymous in the eyes of the general public, but some very familiar.

The Health Minister, for example, who’s been in his job since May 2016. The National Children’s Hospital is easily the largest capital expenditure he will oversee as a minister, possibly in his entire career in politics, so it presumably takes up a significant corner of his mind day to day. He has to make the right appointments, and ensure that everything’s going tickety boo.

Leo Varadkar, who got the ball rolling when he was health minister, at which stage he was satisfied that it would cost only €650m — satisfied enough to sign off on the project in the first place — is another person who might reasonably be expected to have questions to answer. He is the Taoiseach now, after all. Ambitious politicians run for office promising that they will take personal control of what’s wrong with the country. Once in office, personal control turns into collective responsibility and some waffle about a general system failure.

There seem to be question marks hanging over how much the two men were told, and how much they weren’t, but that doesn’t absolve them from blame. If anything, it raises a host of new and intriguing issues as to what questions they were asking.

Most of us, if we were spending that much money, would never stop making a nuisance of ourselves by asking questions, even if it wasn’t actually our money and we were just looking after it on behalf of somebody else. If it’s the case that the development board should have been giving weekly briefings to the Department of Health, the minister is equally at fault for not demanding them.

Then there are all those TDs who sits on various committees, overseeing the work of government. Is it not their job to make sure that public money is well spent, and to know how to get some answers when it isn’t?

Not so long ago, TDs and senators were seeking the power to run Oireachtas investigations into “any matter of general public importance”. If their inability to spot billions of euro disappearing down the plughole is anything to go by, it suggests that voters did the right thing by rejecting that proposal in a referendum in 2011.

As for senior civil servants who handle the day-to-day running of departments, and who might be expected to notice when things are going seriously awry on their watch, an explanation of their role in all this will have to wait on the report of financial consultants PriceWaterhouseCoopers, who’ve been drafted in at a (not inconsiderable) cost of €450,000 to make sense of the mess.

Their findings, due to be delivered at the end of March, are now eagerly awaited by the poor schmucks out there who ultimately pay for all this bureaucratic extravagance.

Prepare for disappointment. There may be a smattering of further resignations along the way, but chances are it won’t be anybody we know by name or sight, not least because the terms of reference for that review into the escalating costs of the National Children’s Hospital state explicitly that it will ascertain only the “role and accountability of the relevant key parties”, and will “stop short of determining culpability at the individual level”.

Surely the least one might expect in return for the guts of half a million euro is to learn who was to blame?

If Tom Costello is the only one who ends up taking the fall for the spiralling cost, it will feel suspiciously as if he’s been offered up as a public sacrifice, in the same way that former HSE chief Tony O’Brien and clinical director Grainne Flannelly were the only ones to resign over the cervical cancer screening scandal.

Two billion euro is a lot of money, but people will get bored of talking about it eventually and move on to other concerns. In the mean- time, the hospital will be built, and will in all likelihood be a magnificent facility and a credit to the nation. It ought to be at that price.

Like all such grand projects, it will then be remembered in future for having been built in the reign of this particular minister and that particular taoiseach, and conveniently forgotten will be that both men were in grave danger of making a pig’s ear of it along the way. Would the Government have realised the need for a shake-up in governance of the project if it hadn’t been for public pressure? And if not, why do they now expect brownie points for belatedly springing into action?

The media probably bears some responsibility for this traditional farce by allowing them to pull such a blatantly cynical bait-and-switch.

Eagerness to shine a spotlight on another example of government incompetence fuels public discontent, which those with the most to lose then seek to dampen down by tossing them a symbolic resignation.

It’s a reminder that, when it comes to wriggling off the hook, politics operates by the same golden rule as the dodgiest casino: The house always wins.

‘Is it not TDs’ job to make sure that public money is well spent?’