Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is a balancing issue. From looking at this issue previously I am aware that Ireland, which is the only island economy in the EU, ends up placing more of its contracts outside the State than other EU countries do. In France 98% or 99% of all contracts given out by public bodies go to French companies. It is the same in Germany, Spain and Italy. Ireland, however, is taking a lazy approach that we just adopted. We all remember the situation some years ago when every leaving certificate examination paper was published in France. They just made the contract so big that a French company got it. The French would never do that. It could have been broken down by subject and made into ten contracts and perhaps ten, six, two or three Irish companies could have bid. It is about how the contract is constructed. This goes back to the scale of the contract and the scale of the turnover and number of people the organisation must have. In my experience, public sector organisations take the lazy approach where they want the bidder to have a big turnover. I have seen how companies or building contractors built housing estates for local authorities and if five or six years later two more houses were wanted in the same estate, the contractor was no longer eligible - having built the previous 20 houses - because the company's turnover in the past two years had diminished during the recession. Things like that do not make sense. There are a number of such cases. In other cases some contracts come up and a company that perhaps has experience in the area does not have turnover. It can set up a joint venture company with some other utterly unconnected business that has a high turnover cashflow. A filling station business with a big cashflow could link up with a builder to form a joint company and then the builder meets the turnover criterion. There are lots of aspects we need to watch. It is easy to construct a company to get the turnover if one sets about to do that. I have seen this happen in practice. These are the issues. In the meantime, the people with the track record are not getting a look in at all. I apologise for that diversion but the members can see where we are at.