Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Regarding the State being taken advantage of by wealthy of conglomerates, most of our procurement goes to SMEs and Irish companies. That is the reality of procurement in Ireland. Where there are large amounts of money involved, there will always be some small number of participants that try to defraud the system. There is also the possibility of multiple bidders colluding so that they divvy up contracts between them and they do not really compete.

As I told Deputy Conway-Walsh, when discussing very large auctions, the first auctions one thinks of are for energy contracts – people bidding on offshore wind farms and so on – mobile phone licences and broadband spectrum. These are multibillion euro contracts, so we want to ensure there is no collusion between the bidders. There is a whole academic discipline that looks into this matter, there are consultants, there are bodies of evidence and so on. There has not been suspicion in recent years of rigging of contracts. As I told Deputy Conway-Walsh, I have asked the OGP to collaborate with the CCPC this year and get its specific advice, as the CCPC is the body that busts cartels and has specific domain knowledge about collusion, and to co-operate with the OGP’s equivalent bodies in other European countries, get their expertise and ask them how they deal with bid rigging. Ultimately, most of this will come down to ensuring that we are collecting as much data as possible, analysing it and looking for anomalies or patterns therein that suggest collusion or fraud.