Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Yes. The Minister is looking at it in the very narrow and confined way that public officials might look at it.

One would often see an advertisement in the paper that a piece of land is going to be registered for the first time. An advertisement from the Property Registration Authority is an invitation to the public. That is what I meant.

The Minister of State mentioned a couple of things that sounded good but do not happen in practice. He spoke about good procurement officers. He might talk us through that. He said that procurement officers are effectively tied by the system they operate. I know of examples in which people who signed the contracts knew that there was a high likelihood of something going wrong because although the paperwork, the bond and finances stacked up they knew the people involved in the company from previous experience. As a result of this pre-qualification, whereby companies had to have a certain level of turnover in previous years, many local contractors were excluded from tendering for contracts because in the downturn their turnover had gone down. By definition in many of the big contracts one was dealing only with major companies because they had the required level of turnover. I can give an example and I guarantee everybody has seen this happen. I know builders who built local authority housing estates of 20, 30 and 40 houses, ten, 15 or 20 years ago. Until a few years ago contractors built two more in the same estate but as their business had gone down they were not eligible to tender for building the extra houses because of the pre-qualification financial requirement, although they had built the 24 in the estate some time earlier. The procurement officer's hands are tied by all these public standard contracts, or whatever they are called, that the Department has in place.

The Minister of State mentioned creating a national procurement officer which if it happens will be good. How many people in the State are procurement officers? Every local authority, VEC, HSE divisional officers, roads department, the NRA-----