Mr. Paul Quinn:

I will try to be brief. I welcome and note the Deputy's comment on the directives. We have a team which has been working on them, even prior to its publication a couple of weeks ago. As the Deputy may be aware, the directives were largely negotiated under the Irish Presidency. We are already working on measures, in advance of the lengthy transposition process. I mentioned earlier that we are working with bodies such as the SFA, ISME, etc., to get their input into a redraft of Circular 10/10, concerning facilitating SME participation in public procurement, which we should be in a position to accelerate in the next month or two. This will be helpful for small businesses.

I am somewhat precluded from discussing the detail of a contract that is currently under way relating to stationery. The Deputy may be aware that the last iteration of that contract was offered to the market as one contract. In the current tender process, we have broken that into four lots, as we are trying to break down bigger elements of business. The smallest of those lots runs to the order of hundreds of thousands of euro rather than millions of euro. We are trying to enable smaller businesses to compete for those contracts.

However, there will be a requirement at the micro level for businesses to create consortia and work together to win business from the State. There is a tension between aggregation value for money at one end, and in terms of inclusion and getting down to micro businesses at the other end. We are doing a lot of work with bodies such as Enterprise Ireland, InterTradeIreland, and the Competition Authority to enable businesses to put together consortia. In fact, in our tender documents we encourage consortia.