Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

On amendment No. 9, one of the things missing from the Bill is the placing of obligations on other Ministers to take appropriate initiatives to promote the circular economy in the sectors where they have responsibility. Amendment No. 9 advocates that we should start to encourage circular compacts within sectors whereby the sectors come together to look at issues like design and material choice, and the other things we have talked about, and that Ministers in those sectors should be actively engaged in this.

Equally, and this must be music to the Minister of State's ears given the principles of circularity in public procurement, I recently had a reply to a parliamentary question from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, in which they record 17% of procurement has been green procurement. It seems we have a long way to go to get to the adoption. Public procurement in Ireland needs some legislative prods to get it to change its pattern. They tend to wait until some constituent organisation is looking for a procurement with a green tinge to it. Legislators then respond by producing a framework that embraces this. We need to get a bit more top-down instead of waiting for a very reactive procurement policy, which I believe is there at the moment. The emphasis is on short-term value rather than lifetime cost and lifetime impact is not well developed in the public procurement sector. Perhaps this Bill is an opportunity for the Minister of State, Deputy Smyth, to put a little bit of lead in his pencil when he goes across the road to his other responsibilities in the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. I will not go beyond that, but I am tempted to recall how the embassy in France was procured by the Irish State.