Colm Burke (Cork North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will focus on the issue of public contracts, in particular, public private partnership and the way forward. I am concerned about the process of the putting in place of public contracts, as a result of which a major cost is being added to the contracts. I will cite the example of a contract with which I was directly involved. It was a school premises where a new school needed to be built. A State agency objected to the planning permission. Even though that State agency was given an undertaking that the number of students in the school would not be increased further, it took the matter all the way to An Bord Pleanála. That State agency caused a delay to the provision of a school.

A second issue was a further delay arising from the time the tenders were submitted to the when a tender was accepted, as a result of which the pricing of the project had changed. The lowest tenderer could not complete the project for the price the contractor tendered and it offered to submit a revised tender, which would still have been lower than the next lowest tender. The Department refused to allow that. It went to the second lowest tender and that contractor would not accept the project and neither would the third or fourth lowest tender. The project was awarded to the fifth lowest tenderer that tendered for it. There was a price difference of approximately €700,000 between the tender price that was finally accepted and what the revised tender of the lowest tenderer would have been, if accepted. That did not represent good value for the taxpayer. Surely there must be a process for dealing with those problems. A State agency objected to planning for a State project and despite entering into discussions on it, that State agency did not back down. There was also a delay in processing the tendering and even getting the project ready for tendering. How does Mr. Moloney envisage such an issue would be dealt with in future?