Liam Twomey (Wexford, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Fleming's amendment might be dealing with situations before the contract is awarded. The Minister of State talks about how he looks at these issues. Does he review every single tendering contract particularly when they fail? There are two reasons why tendering contracts fail. One is that there are many people who are desperate for work, tender too low and simply fail to achieve the result the expected to achieve. The other reason relates to what is actually driving this kind of subcontractors' legislation. There are people who set out to rip people off from the outset and never have any intention of paying anybody. There is that difference. Do we look at every single tendering contract in the public sector that fails and examine the reasons why it failed? That would then follow through on what Deputy Fleming is talking about. We would be identifying people who fail and who fail on a regular basis and we might identify who we describe in this country as cowboys. I remember talking to some proponents of this legislation a number of years ago. They told me that it was used very infrequently in the UK particularly where the arbitration issue was concerned and that they had seen an increase in its use in the UK after our construction industry collapsed because a number of people who used to work in this country moved to the UK, brought their bad practices with them and found themselves facing arbitration in a way they were not used to expecting in this country.