John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

On the issue of procurement, I do not expect the Department to police every contract or arrangement that is entered into, but for recent years, particularly the last two, we have had to examine accounts of various Departments and agencies and in most of those accounts we identified cases in which procurement was not carried out properly, as agreed with Mr. Watt's Department. In 2014, for example, under the Garda Vote, there were 51 contracts, with a total value of €6.7 million; under the Vote for the Prison Service there were 11 contracts, with a value €2.8 million; under the Vote for the Courts Service there were contracts worth almost €750,000 for which there was no competitive process; under the Vote for the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, there were 14 such contracts, with a total value of €1.5 million; in the Department of Social Protection, such contracts numbered ten, with a value of €1 million; and in the HSE there were 299 cases, valued at €56.5 million. Those Departments and bodies gave various explanations for this, the most common one being that they did not have specialist procurement staff available. In other instances they said that there was an extension or roll-over of the contract, that they had to acquire the goods from a special agent or that-----