Children’s hospital recklessness may scupper Government

It is difficult to overstate the political implications of the national children’s hospital controversy. It puts much more than the political career of a single Minister at risk. It retains the potential to create a deep crisis for the Government, not least because it touches on the increasingly sensitive fault lines in the confidence-and-supply agreement with Fianna Fáil.

Tensions on the issue will resurface when the PwC report is finalised and published at the end of March. This may be just as the constraints Brexit imposes on full-blooded political competition in this country dissipate if, as seems likely, Brexit is delayed.

The hospital controversy has already exposed serious gaps at the very heart of the Government’s political management and a worrying level of dysfunction in collective civil service management at the highest level. It has also exposed, again, a disregard for parliamentary accountability.

The traditional government defence for not telling a TD something used to be “you didn’t ask the right question”. On September 18th last, Fianna Fáil’s spokesman on public expenditure, Barry Cowen, put precisely the right question when he asked the Minister for Health to state “the original budgeted cost of building the national children’s hospital; the cost incurred to date on the project; if it is in budget when compared to the original budget; if not, the amount by which it overspent”.

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We now know Simon Harris and his department then knew of a potential for a massive cost overrun on the children’s hospital. It was a major issue for them during the Dáil recess over the previous weeks. One is entitled to presume, therefore, that when the Dáil returned and this question came in from Cowen, the greatest of care was taken at the highest political and administrative levels in the department in drafting the reply. One assumes also that senior Fine Gael political advisers in the department were similarly across it, since the question came from an Opposition spokesman, and one with whom their party had negotiated a confidence-and-supply agreement that included an express “no surprises” clause.

Mind-boggling recklessness

The best of advisers know that being across the detail of replies to parliamentary questions is essential. Experience teaches that, if anything, greater attention should be paid to written Dáil replies because these often get less attention from the Minister. It is truly extraordinary, therefore, that the reply to Cowen’s question suggested that everything was okay and that the overall budget for the project was “in line with the expected expenditure profile”. The reply was incomplete to the point of incredulity, and Harris rightly apologised for it this week. The reply was also mind-boggling in its political recklessness.

The delay in sharing information with party colleagues was also dangerous. Half of August, all of September and October and most of November passed without the Cabinet knowing that a big hole had been blown in the funding foundations for the glossy capital development plan that they had been touring the country launching, relaunching and localising for months.

Where were the Government’s political control systems? The Minister sat with the Minister for Public Expenditure and the Taoiseach in Cabinet once a week. The secretaries-general of the two departments meet with their colleagues at least once a week. The senior political advisers also meet weekly. These people were also involved intensely in budget negotiations at the time. Yet the Taoiseach told the Dáil last week he first heard of the overrun “during a brief conversation in the context of a wider health policy discussion” on November 9th.

Personal responsibility

Last week Pascal Donohoe told TD Mick Wallace his department’s role was “in respect of the monitoring of overall expenditure by department and not oversight of individual projects”. The Minister was more accepting of personal political responsibility on Morning Ireland on Wednesday.

It is shocking that a project of this scale, the most iconic in the capital programme, attracted no proactive monitoring of its budget by the department that is the State’s financial controller. Are we seriously being asked to believe that it dawned on the Opposition spokesman Barry Cowen to inquire whether things were still on budget but the same idea did not dawn on anyone in the Department of Public Expenditure over months?

The department proclaims its mission statement to be to support “the delivery of well-managed, well-targeted and sustainable public spending through modernised, effective and accountable public services.” There is little sign of well-managed public spending or effectiveness in the national children’s hospital project. The drive for real political accountability on this issue may have been delayed but it hasn’t gone away.

To borrow a phrase from the Sir Humphrey, speak that has been all too prevalent in this controversy, it may now be time to “re-profile the potential and timescale” for this Government’s survival.