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

The Minister of State asked me why I referred to State contracting authorities in my amendment. He used that wording to that effect in the legislation and I was using his terminology. The majority of the complaints I received in my constituency regarding subcontractors not being paid related to State contracts. The subcontractors contacted me as a public representative. If a local shop was having development work carried out or a private company was building a housing development and something were to go wrong, that would be a public sector issue but we are in the public domain.

In the case of a public contract such as for a school or swimming pool, for example, the people supplying the materials were probably more confident that they would be paid because the State was writing the cheque to cover the cost of the contract. They know there is a greater element of risk in supplying materials for a new shopping development which is a private speculation. That is why I included the provision to tie it to the State. Most of the people who have come to me were burned by contracts. They might not have supplied the materials if it had been a private development, but in this case the Department of Education and Skills was paying for the building and the cheque should have been guaranteed.

Sub-contractors are fine, but most of the people I met did not know the name of the main contractor. The representatives of the construction industry could explain this better than me. When a contractor is given a job to build a school, he subcontracts the site work, for example, the block work. The main contractor probably has few or no employees and hardly visits the site. The guy who is given the site work contract subcontracts to guys who do the digging or lay the foundations. They, in turn, subcontract the supply of blocks to someone else. There can be six links in the chain to the guy who actually does the work and he only knows the guy who employed him.