Mr. Paul Quinn:

I am the Government's chief procurement officer. In terms of lessons learned, what was very important during this period was the speed with which the Office of Government Procurement, OGP, and the health system acted. It is coming up on a year since the OGP issued guidance to all the public service bodies regarding the flexibilities it had within the procurement laws and the procurement directives. What that allowed was for public bodies to move ahead under the situation that people found themselves in of extreme and unforeseeable urgency to produce that which they needed to do. It extended not only into the health service but beyond that to other bodies like the Garda, the prison services, direct provision centres and eventually into education. People needed to do things to enable the services to citizens to continue. We issued guidance almost a year ago, literally within days of the start of the pandemic on 22 March. That supported people in doing that which they needed to do. About a week later the European Commission followed up with a similar piece of guidance that supported people in doing what they needed to do.

The Deputy's question about what we learned is an important one. I would draw attention to a couple of things. These are lessons we have shared with the OECD and the European Commission. Importantly, the structures we established under the reform guise helped enormously in the entire system pulling together. It enabled my office at the centre, working with players like health, education and local government, to procure that which was needed and to leverage arrangements that were required. In particular, the health system moved ahead very quickly, as we know, to procure personal protective equipment, PPE. My office worked across the remainder of the public service to consolidate their needs and we were able to leverage off those arrangements with the health system to ensure people like the Prison Service, direct provision centres, etc. were able to get that which they needed very quickly.

We played a huge role not only in providing advice but also providing a mechanism for co-ordination. It is a similar story across other countries internationally but Ireland's scale and the fact we had established these arrangements for co-operation and collaboration under the reform banner paid dividends during that time.