Quality in Public Procurement (Contract Preparation and Award Criteria) Bill 2021 [Seanad]: Second Stage [Private Members] Dail Éireann — 2026-02-12 ============================================================ Sinéad Gibney (SD), Dublin Rathdown I thank Deputies Ahearn, Boyd Barrett and O'Reilly for their contributions. This whole experience of bringing forward the Bill, talking to countless colleagues across the Government and Opposition benches over recent weeks and then coming to the House to receive the news that the Government is not going to support it makes me, as a new TD, so sad. I hear every day from the leaders of the Minister of State's party and its coalition partner that we do not offer solutions and that the Government engages constructively. This Bill is the result of eight years of constructive engagement, inside this House and outside. It was brought to the Government as a solution and its answer is, "No, thanks." I am genuinely sad that I am faced with that. I am a legislator. I was elected to be a legislator. This is legislation that addresses a very real problem that we all acknowledge and the Government is saying, "No, thanks". I am going to go through some of the details. Some of details of the Minister of State's response are problematic and completely ill-informed. I will start with the children's hospital. It seems to me that the Minister of State is saying that the Government is happy for the model to continue that allowed the decision for the children's hospital project to go the way it did because the cost was considered at 75% within the procurement matrix. This Bill would bring quality to 50%. Is the Minister of State okay with that? Two days ago, the Minister of State's colleague the Minister for Health engaged with my colleague Deputy Rice. When asked if the contract was fundamentally flawed, the Minister said that we would not take that step again. She said that the contractual structure is not one we would approach or adopt again. This Bill does exactly what she is asking. Two days after she spoke, the Bill is available to the Government on the Dáil of the floor. The Government says we do not offer solutions and do not want to work collaboratively. That is what I am doing today and this is the response I get. It takes the wind out of my sails, as a new TD, to get this kind of response. It is depressing. I will go through some of the misinformation that I have identified within the Minister of State's contribution. The Dutch figure has been misconstrued. The increase of 3% is in the procurement process, not in the projects. The figure of €10 billion is just wrong. The actual increase, which was shown in other research from Utrecht, which is perhaps where the Minister of State is getting this from, was 1%. As other colleagues have pointed out, that 1% increase in cost must be compared with the trade-off involved in losing quality and life-cycle costs. The actual value for money overall is bolstered by bringing in quality. It is not diminished, which is what the Minister of State's whole contribution seemed to say. The Government says it wants value for money. This Bill would bring value for money. It is achievable within the framework of the most economically advantageous tender. We chose, as a member state, to interpret it in a completely restrictive manner. All this Bill would do is address that. To say it is premature when it is in response to a 2014 directive, which was 12 years ago, is insane. It has taken us this long to get the legislation to the floor of the Dáil. It took work to get it through the Seanad, where colleagues of the Minister of State who will vote against it next Wednesday spoke in favour of it. Deputy Malcolm Byrne, who was then a Senator, spoke in favour of it. I have the quote here. He will shortly to vote against it. What changed between 2022 and 2025? He spoke in favour of it. The Government spoke in favour of it. I ask the Minister of State to tell me why we should now decide that this is not the way to go. I want to pick up on another factual piece. The Minister of State talked about the ministerial oversight that is sought when cost-only is required. That is an out-of-date response. It was in one of the earlier drafts of the legislation. That is exactly what I was talking about. Senator Higgins addressed that in this newer 2022 draft. The updated Bill stated a requirement for a senior figure in the organisation, which means it will not have to go to ministerial level. That is another point I wanted to address. The Minister of State referenced the progress that has been made in this space. I fully acknowledge that progress has been made. Circulars have been issued. It is referenced in the national strategy for collective bargaining as a pilot. All of that is the result of the work of Senator Higgins. It is because she has been engaging with the OGP and officials in the Minister of State's Department. That is why this is happening. This legislation would put it on a statutory footing and give clarity to everyone. That would allow us, as a member state, to say that we are progressive in our procurement and that we are recognising the social and ethical considerations that should be a part of the procurement process. Going back to the point about value for money, this Bill would allow for better decision-making that embraces value for money. The Minister of State said that it contradicts the Government's aim of supporting local and indigenous businesses, but he is wrong. That is exactly what it will do. As I said earlier, I have done this. I have designed and overseen procurement processes as part of the development and running of a State agency. I can say that because the culture is lowest cost only, the hands of the people in the procurement process are tied. They come to the decision-making process and see someone coming in who they know is problematic but they have to give them the contract because they have low-balled. That is what happens. The Minister of State talks about freedom. The freedom in the existing process is a fallacy. This Bill would empower people to introduce social and ethical considerations. That is a side aspect. The main thing it allows is the rewarding of good behaviour. It would reward good performers who will provide quality contracts to the State. That is what the Bill would allow for. It would not tie people's hands. It would untie them. I also want to reference the example of CervicalCheck, which was touched on a couple of times. I do not think it has been shared that the Scally report, which was an independent review of the CervicalCheck scandal and the screening programme, identified an overemphasis on obtaining the lowest cost from suppliers without equivalent emphasis on other quality and service-level measures as a key concern. That is a human cost of a poor procurement process. The independent expert is telling us that it is because we could not consider quality in the process. We have the big-money scandal of the children's hospital. We have the tragic human scandal of CervicalCheck. Numerous examples have been outlined today, and yet this Government continues to oppose the legislation. I think I know where the heart of the Government's objection lies. At the beginning of his speech the Minister of State referenced there being an increase in the level of bureaucracy and competition. He also said it seemed the entire Bill was premature. What is actually going on is the Minister of State and the Government are buying in to the current European vision for simplification and harmonisation. They are the two words I hear again and again. I am hearing them in relation to AI and the digital omnibus package travelling through the EU at the moment. We hear it about the occupied territories Bill. We hear about simplification and harmonisation all the time. One of the Minister of State's colleagues mentioned relieving the regulatory burden to me last week, though I cannot remember what it was in relation to. This is a better way to do procurement but, according to the simplification agenda, the Minister of State suggests it is about increasing regulation. That is my issue. I suspect what the Government wants is deregulation. It wants to embrace this drive to the bottom and this abandonment of the European Union standards we all hold dear and cherish as citizens of the Union. That is the agenda that is being promoted and which this Government is buying into hook, line and sinker. It does not make me anti-European to say that. We are one of 27 member states. I had a brief exchange on this with the Minister for public expenditure and reform last night and he told me this is not in line. The Minister of State has said the same and that, basically, these discussions are happening. I do not buy that for a second anyway because those discussions and negotiations will take years, meaning the Government could implement this legislation and then deal with anything else further down the line. As such, I do not buy it time-wise. When it comes to ethos and principles, however, if the Government knows simplification is coming and that it will ultimately drop the standards and quality of the procurement process in this State, it should not be rushing to conform to it. The Government, on behalf of the Irish people, should be pushing against it with all its might. That is what this Bill does. The Government should go back to the table and say Ireland has introduced quality into the process and it has been beneficial to the State, rather than waiting for the EU to tell it to drop it altogether. That is the saddest part of all this. In his response the Minister of State tried to pick things out and used examples that are ill-informed, poorly packaged and show me he does not understand what this Bill attempts to do. Underlying this is that the Government is hell-bent on the agenda of simplification, which in other words is deregulation. This Bill does not sit with that and that is why the Government is going to resist it. That is what has changed between 2022 and 2025. Like Deputy O'Reilly, I urge the Minister of State to bring this back to the Minister, Deputy Chambers. I will continue to talk to the Minister of State's colleagues. I have talked to so many of them over the last two weeks who looked at the Bill and said it was a great idea and asked why we are not doing this already. I will continue to do that until the vote next Wednesday and I am going to look all of them in the eye when they vote against it. --- 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/dail/2026-02-12/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:02+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-12