Ahern to await report on work of consultants

No decision on the work of consultants hired to deal with health technology would be taken by the Government until it received a report on the matter, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern indicated.

"Regarding taking action against Deloitte & Touche or anyone else, we must base our decision on the report's findings and whether they simply continued based on the contract they were given, which was too open-ended," Mr Ahern said.

"We have closed down such business in the infrastructural area and we will do so in this area if necessary."

Mr Ahern said there were many people carrying out individual consultancy contracts, companies both small and large, for departments and agencies. "Many others are actively involved in projects," he said.

"They are doing a good job and we should not try to tar everyone as having made a mess of things, since that is not correct."

The Taoiseach was replying to Labour leader Pat Rabbitte, who had asked if the Government was taking legal advice "regarding whether any action will be taken against the consultants, who apparently got away scot-free with €50 million of taxpayers' money for making the biggest hames of an IT project in the history of the State hitherto".

Mr Ahern said that the Comptroller and Auditor General was preparing a report, while the Health Service Executive (HSE) had decided last week to have a comprehensive review at its meeting next month.

"When the Government receives that report, it will decide what else it should do," he added. "We should wait and let the HSE undertake a full evaluation of what happened over recent years."

Pressed further by Mr Rabbitte, the Taoiseach said the reason consultants were brought in was because sometimes departments lacked in-house expertise and skills, had insufficient resources to complete a task on time or there was a need for an independent and objective view.

"In IT and other projects in this country, there has, unfortunately, been a high failure rate. Plenty of figures have come into the public domain in that regard in the last few days," he said.

"The OECD has issued many warnings regarding issues of public governance and leadership, failure to identify and manage skills, lack of skills to manage external providers and failure to involve end-users."

Earlier, Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny asked if the review would examine a major project involving the HSE and a company called iSOFT, relating to hospital information systems' projects.

In 2003, the company was recommended to undertake the project following a detailed review "by none other than Deloitte & Touche", he said. "What has happened this €400 million project since is unclear."

"The Tánaiste yesterday suggested that the then minister, Micheál Martin, had put a stop to it, but I have been informed that the contract for iSOFT was signed following emergency high-level meetings between the Department of Health, Department of the Taoiseach and the Attorney General's office earlier this year."

He also claimed that five sets of consultants had been brought in to deal with the e-Cabinet project.

"Is it not a fact of life that a catalogue of gross incompetence is the reason we do not have the additional 2,000 gardaí, the front-line services we deserve and why we still have waiting lists while trolleys are piled up in the corridors of some hospitals?"

Mr Ahern said that people with design and international expertise were engaged on the e-Cabinet project. "The point I made last week is that we did this for under €5 million because we needed the outside expertise to come in only to do some design work," he said.