Accelerating Infrastructure Action Plan: Motion
Seanad Éireann — 2026-03-04
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Patricia Stephenson (SD), Labour Panel

I thank the Minister. It is obviously a timely debate. I was at the infrastructure committee earlier where we were talking about procurement. I will spend some time talking about that challenge of doing procurement well. Our procurement and tendering process has so many gaps that are leading to big scandals like the national children’s hospital where repetitive change orders are being put in place. I would love to know what we can do to strengthen this process. There is also the question of quality procurement. We have a culture of lowest cost, where the contract goes out to tender and we have the lowest cost coming back from the contractors who are bidding for it. We are not taking quality into account, and quality in procurement is so important for things like disability and environment and to get the best possible outcome for infrastructure no matter what the area. Issues have been raised around the bureaucratic and onerous nature of our public procurement processes, exclusionary qualifying criteria, poorly defined project briefs, unrealistic budgets – we hear a lot of feedback on that from contractors – a lack of understanding of complexity of the construction stage on the part of the clients, in this case the client being the Government, and a lack of collaboration on the whole chain of the process. The risk is transferred to the people who are bidding on the contract. I would love to know what we could do to strengthen that. Perhaps it could be the creation of an expert unit responsible for procurement and project management.
The Minister’s Department is responsible for infrastructure and the budgets and design but when some of that is outsourced to other Departments do they have the in-house expertise? The case of CHI and the national children’s hospital is the one that comes into my head and I know we have spoken about it at length. Does CHI have the in-house expertise? Is it dealing with the procurement piece correctly? How can we bridge the gap to make sure it is?
I am very concerned that instead of trying to implement a robust and reformed system to improve oversight and implementation in the infrastructure sector we are putting in more processes that will make mistakes more quickly.
I agree with the idea of streamlining. I agree it is good but I worry that streamlining and simplification is often used as a synonym for things like deregulation.
I am concerned that we are actually going to be making planning decisions more difficult and risking other arbitration decisions further down the line.
The whole piece around planning and the planning process is obviously incredibly important. We had an era where a lot of planners left Ireland during the crash. Am I saying something funny, Senator Murphy?

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-03-04/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:43+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-03-04