Public Procurement Contracts Seanad Éireann — 2026-01-20 ============================================================ Linda Nelson Murray (FG), Industrial and Commercial Panel I thank the Minister of State for coming to the House and congratulate him on his new role. It is great to have the Minister of State here to debate this matter. I would like to explore the difficulties smaller firms have in putting themselves forward in the tendering process, particularly for Government projects. In a rapidly changing world, the real technical, strategic and innovative expertise is often in smaller companies and we are missing a trick here. The Government should be able to benefit from that expertise. I am going to use a recent example of a tender for a €60,000 contract in my own county of Meath and outline the criteria involved. The first requirement is confirmation of tax compliance, which is fair enough. We all need to be tax compliant. The second is confirmation that the tendering party's turnover exceeded over €200,000 for the last three years. That would probably cut a lot of businesses out of being able to do anything. The third is confirmation that the following insurance is in place: employer's liability of €13 million and public liability of €6.5 million. There are plenty of small businesses that could not afford that type of insurance and that do not have a turnover of €200,000. They are probably dying to grow their businesses by being able to get some of these contracts but they cannot do so. I am doing a lot of work at the moment on the hot school meals programme. I had a look at the insurance conditions in the supplier tenders. A supplier needs employer's liability insurance of €13 million, public liability insurance of €6.5 million, product liability insurance of €6.5 million, motor insurance of €1.3 million, crime insurance of €100,000 on any one claim, and cyber insurance of €1 million. That is for a €50,000 contract. How are companies supposed to have that level of cover and pay those extortionate insurance costs to be able to get into the tender process? I am going to let some small Irish business owners speak for themselves. One business told me they had this exact problem during the summer. They put the effort in to win a particularly good and large tender but were then forced to accept terms and conditions that were written for a very large business, not a small one. Another told me that the employer liability and public liability insurance requirements eliminate SMEs and microenterprises. The business owner suggested that those values are boilerplate requirements and suspected they are copied and pasted from tender to tender without question. Another business owner said that they had been there, done the tenders but had effectively given up on public procurement in Ireland and the UK. Similarly, another business owner referred to expected turnovers of €250,000 and expected levels of insurance that were too high and argued that businesses would not be looking for new tenders if they were turning over more than €250,000. Plenty of projects for tender are highly suited to small and more agile SMEs. Projects could be completed on time and to better standards, thus saving money. There needs to be different levels of tendering that are more accessible to different sized companies. Another business owner told me that in the early days of their business they tried to tender as a consortium for some work with Enterprise Ireland. Their partners in another European country saw the insurance requirements and said that that type of insurance cover simply did not exist in their country. This morning I spoke to a friend who is in the furniture business. I asked how they were getting on with tendering for Government contracts and was told that they spent ten years applying for tenders but not only did they not win any, they did not even get an inquiry or anything to encourage them to keep going. They said it was such a disheartening process. The irony is that they are now actually supplying Government projects, but as a subcontractor because the bigger firms have won the tenders. Another business owner had the exact same experience, where they were trying to get into a Government contract, were not successful but are now subcontracting. The main contractors get paid within 15 to 30 days but subcontractors have to wait 60 to 90 days to be paid. If they cannot win some of these bigger contracts, how are they going to buy the machinery and products to enable them to go for other contracts in the future? The expertise in smaller, growing firms can sometimes be greater than in larger firms. Larger firms also have extra costs in managers, project managers and advisers. Smaller firms do not have these costs and can be very competitive. SMEs are having to collaborate to apply for a tender. How is that fair? This is a can of worms that is only going to get bigger. I look forward to the Minister of State's response. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-01-20/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:31+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-01-20