MINISTER FOR Health Mary Harney denied there was ever a doubt about the construction of the cystic fibrosis unit at Dublin’s St Vincent’s hospital.

She said the sole reason why the project was delayed and could not go to tender during the latter part of last year was an eight-month delay in the design caused by engagement with the architect for the cystic fibrosis community. “It was never the case that the project would not proceed,” she added.

Ms Harney said she did not accept the analysis that a guarantee from the Government to pay a construction firm would not be attractive to the construction industry as the information available to her was very different.

“A government guarantee to pay for a project is as good as money in the bank,” she added.

“Clearly, the project will have to be financed but notwithstanding the current banking difficulties, there is no question that a bank would not forward money on the basis of a Government guarantee to pay on delivery.”

Ms Harney said that many projects in the private sector were delivered precisely in that manner, with payment made on delivery of the project rather than in a staged manner, which had been the approach traditionally adopted by the State.

Ms Harney was responding to a Fine Gael private members’ motion calling for the immediate development of the unit.

She said the next stage in the development at St Vincent’s would involve building a new ward block to replace existing accommodation. The new facility would consist exclusively of single rooms for inpatients.

She was pleased to have found a way to allow the project to proceed to tender so that it could be operational as early as possible in 2011.

The project would proceed on the basis that payment to the contractor would be made at the end of the construction phase.

“This represents a genuinely innovative way to deliver the project,” she added. “In the current challenging environment, we need to find new solutions and find new ways of progressing important projects such as this.”

Fine Gael health spokesman Dr James Reilly said he was pleading with the Minister not to delay the project further because they did not want to lose more young people unnecessarily.

“We must ensure. . . that these brave young people and their distraught families are not forced on to the streets and the airwaves again in another six months.”

Jan O’Sullivan (Labour) said the difference between campaigner Orla Tinsley and the dodgy developers, whose loans were being taken on by the taxpayer, was not just that she was courageous or that she had cystic fibrosis, “it is that she has become a household name and they have not.

“We all met Ms Tinsley outside the Dáil last week. She said she was sick of having to expose her personal life and her health in public again and again, having to talk about her friends who are now dead and having to fight battles they thought they had already won.”

Sinn Féin’s Caoimhghin Ó Caoláin said what had happened in the Dáil this week raised a fundamental question about ministerial responsibility, health policy and the strategic management of the health service. The announcement that funding for the unit would not be available was followed by a ministerial announcement that it would go ahead.

A Government amendment to the Fine Gael motion endorsing its policy was carried by 70 votes to 61.