Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin says the Government needs to “come clean” about the details of the escalating cost of the national children’s hospital.
"I think the Government needs to come clean with the people, we're learning about this again in a drip-drip way, just like with CervicalCheck," he told Newstalk’s Pat Kenny show.
"No one's against a children's hospital - in fact, in some respects, the rush to have a children's hospital probably has led to where we are in the sense that people were despairing that we'd never get it after the planning application was refused.
"My understanding is over €200 million has gone into this - the contracts were signed by the Government is December.
"And again, they did it with great haste - I don't understand that part of it.
Simon Harris announced yesterday... 'I had three choices: I had to either pause, re-tender or go ahead.
"Nobody knew that in December that he had three choices, he didn't share that with anybody.
"What we're reading in the Irish Times now (is) he was told in August, why didn't he share it then with the general public and with the Government, and say 'we have an issue here'?
"And then we now knew a year earlier the steering group ... were asking serious questions about overruns.”
Earlier his party’s Finance spokesperson Michael McGrath told Newstalk Breakfast that it was extraordinary and “not believable” that senior officials from the Department of Health “would be sitting on a steering committee, managing the largest capital project in the history of that department, that they would be aware for up to a year that the cost of the children's hospital was spiralling - and they did not bring that to the attention of the minister?"
