Quest for a scalp is waste of our energy

IT IS time for a reality check. The deal for building the National Children’s Hospital was not done on Simon Harris’s watch. It is a project he inherited. The cost overruns are staggering and his failure to raise the alarm earlier is very damaging, but the fundamentals are unchanged. We need the hospital and it will be built, on the current site.

Nonetheless, the controversy has led to a febrile, noxious atmosphere of faux outrage. The Health Minister has been impressive in overseeing his portfolio, and seems committed to making the HSE juggernaut change course for the better.

Sinn Féin’s calls for Fianna Fáil support in a vote of no-confidence ring hollow. When the Northern Ireland Assembly was active, Sinn Féin didn’t have a great record of managing public finances. In this jurisdiction, it enjoys the benefit of being in opposition, taking that literally merely to oppose everything while advancing no coherent strategy of its own.

Add in the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee, now just a star chamber for political grandstanding, and what we are seeing is the devaluing of responsible politics, replaced by populist showboating.

There are real questions to be asked. The Department of Health is on the hook, but where were the Department of Finance and Public Expenditure and Minister Paschal Donohoe in all this? You might think that the single biggest construction project in the history of the State would merit weekly meetings on budgets and delivery, but that seems not to have been the case. That shows a flagrant disregard for taxpayers’ money, and a minister asleep at the wheel.

What we need now is very simple – an inquiry into how the deal with BAM was struck and why the company secured a contract that appears to have had no penalty for a budget spiralling out of control. The nature of the deal must be made public.

The knock-on effect is that other capital expenditure projects are now in jeopardy, and the really pressing issue facing the health service, the nurses’ strike, is being allowed drift, despite the potentially dangerous consequences for patients.

That is the issue all parties should be concentrating on, not wasting energy and breath trying to get another political scalp, when the man in question is guilty, at this point, only of dragging his heels on revealing massive cost overruns.

Real challenges face the country. That bloated ‘controversy’ is a luxury we might be able to afford in more carefree times, but not at this moment in our history. It is time to return the focus to where it belongs.