Departmental Contracts
Dail Éireann — 2026-05-28
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Albert Dolan (FF), Galway East

I thank the Minister for his work in writing to all the State bodies to remind them of their obligation under the EU open data directive that they have to publish their purchase orders in machine-readable format. To give the Minister an example, Transport Infrastructure Ireland, TII, the children's hospital and the Arts Council were not publishing but once he wrote to them, this ensured that they did start publishing. We had written to them as well. The Minister will be aware of my work with my team in collating all the information to get over €100 billion in procurement spend tracked over the past decade. It goes back to the fundamental point that the State can tell us that a payment was made but it is not easy to see which contract authorised it. Some entities and some suppliers have multiple contracts with multiple State entities and it is actually really difficult to see exactly what they were doing or what they provided. For Ministers and for everyone to be able to assess what value was actually provided, we need to know which contract underpinned that spend. That is where I am going with this and that is where that additional column needs to come in.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-05-28/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:08+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-28