Health Procurement: Motion Seanad Éireann — 2026-01-29 ============================================================ Maria Byrne (FG), Agricultural Panel I support the motion. I will give the example of a friend of mine whose husband recently had to have his tests sent to two different countries. One was England and I am not sure what the other was, but they were told it would take up to eight weeks for the results to come back because the tests had been sent out of the country. This is a very opportune time for us to look at Irish companies and at how we can make better use of private companies to deliver this specialised testing. As Senator Kyne outlined, there are many qualified companies out there but because of the way procurement is structured, they cannot tender for it. This is a really important matter. We encourage people to shop local and keep everything local. The sooner we can bring Irish companies into this procurement process, the better. --- 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/2026-01-29/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:34+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-01-29