Mr. Robert Watt:

The reason it is lower is because we are much more open. We have a smaller base so there are things we just do not produce in this country because we are a much more open economy given our size compared to other countries. We have looked at this in detail over a number of years and tried to everything we can to ensure that SMEs and local suppliers have access to the contracts. I will talk about those in a moment.

There is an enormous challenge for the system to make savings in a way which mitigates the impact on suppliers and employment in particular areas. There is no easy answer here. There are difficult trade-offs. If we are to reduce our spend, which we must do, it has a knock-on effect on the rest of economy which, unfortunately, has a knock-on effect on demand and jobs. It is the same in any other area of spending by the Government. In terms of what we have done, we issued Circular 10/10 in August 2010 which looked at the administrative burden SMEs face. We had incredibly high turnover and insurance thresholds that made it very difficult for many small companies to compete for contracts so we issued a circular that made a real push to ensure that the administrative requirements part of a tender were commensurate with the value of the contract. We went out of our way to ensure that as large a number of participants as possible were able to be involved in the contract. We have done much in terms of standardising documents and reducing the burden. We work with Enterprise Ireland and InterTradeIreland in identifying opportunities for procurement and providing whatever assistance we can to ensure Irish companies are in a position to compete with others. We are engaging with IBEC and the business groups all the time in terms of the procurement process, how we can structure contracts in a sensible way and how we can ensure Irish companies are in a position to compete.

We have a tendency to aggregate contracts because we as a system want to benefit from the market power we have. Within that, we try to break it up into lots which give an opportunity for SMEs because if contracts are too large, they are obviously excluded. We have done much in this space. Mr. Quinn and his team continue to monitor how we are performing. The Minister gets representations from companies on a frequent basis. There is an element in the contracts. People lose contracts. The Deputy knows how it works. We tender for a school and "X" number of people apply to build the school but only one contractor will be happy. It is inevitable that there will be noise in the system but we try to set up a system that gives as many suppliers as possible the opportunity to compete. Our sense of it is that Irish suppliers do quite well but we can get the updated figures for the Deputy.