Mr. Tim Murnane:

I am the president of the Association of Consulting Engineers of Ireland. I am joined by Shane Dempsey, our director general. Fellow members of the executive Joe Burns, Gemma McCarthy and Ciaran McGovern are sitting behind me. We are having some technical difficulties but we will keep going regardless.

I will start by talking about who we are. We are the representative body for consulting engineering businesses in Ireland. It is important to emphasise that our members are the businesses responsible for delivering the designs to support infrastructure delivery in the country. I say that to distinguish us from the other bodies here today. Our member firms include small local SMEs and range from one-man or one-woman bands right up to global consulting engineering businesses. I think our technical issues have been sorted. There is a full range from small companies right up to very large companies. It is very important that the work of the public sector in delivering infrastructure in Ireland is attractive to that full cohort. That is really important for diversity within the country. Our member firms play a critical role in every construction project planned or constructed in Ireland. If you are driving around the country and see someone with a hi-vis vest, whether on a footpath, a road, a bridge or a building, our member firms will have designed whatever they are building. Nothing gets built without our member firms' involvement. We play a very central role in construction in the country. With regard to the slide being displayed, I emphasise that we have consulting engineers in the middle with housing, cities and so on around the edge. We are involved in everything.

On this slide, we have set out some of the challenges. I will not labour them because we all know what they are. Our role is to assist and support the Government in delivering infrastructure. One of our key points here today is to communicate to the members the challenges we see in enabling us to do the work to help the Government and the country to deliver the vital infrastructure we need. To use an analogy, I have talked about snowplough parenting in some of my previous speeches. This is the concept of removing obstacles from the path of our children as they go to school and so on. We can comment on whether that is appropriate as regards children's resilience but, in terms of engineering consultancies, it is really important that there is a snowplough to remove the barriers to the delivery of infrastructure. We need the Government to help us to remove these barriers. We will then play our part in delivering the infrastructure.

It is important to say that, as engineers, we are doers and, as Mr. Finlay put it, problem solvers. We just want to get on with solving the problems. It is very important that we are not dragged into the mire that prevents us from doing that. I want to communicate that and today's meeting is very beneficial for us in that regard. The projects we are talking about are those outlined in the national development plan, the national planning framework and the climate action plan.

I will really emphasise this final point regarding our members as being designers and the businesses that design the solutions. The design phase is really crucial. It is a really important stage in the project. It is where we can bring maximum value in terms of value for money, ensuring things are delivered on time and having detailed designs that can be constructed on budget. It is really important in terms of procurement that this design phase is appreciated and valued. That is where it is won and lost.

If we want to ask where our problems with infrastructure are, quite often it is that design is not given the value and the time it deserves and demands. This is the key message we want to convey today. If we invest in design, we will get better project outcomes. It is a really important message.

To focus a bit more on our request, it was very interesting to hear the Minister for public expenditure saying the other day that the systems and mindsets that have held infrastructure development way behind should be removed. This is very consistent with my snowplough analogy. Whether I have said that to the Minister and he has adapted it or not, I am not sure, but it is the same principle. We need to remove the barriers and whatever we call it, whether it is a snowplough or anything else, that is what we want to do.

Red tape is a widely used term. In terms of cutting it, a few red tape things really impact our work. I will start at a higher level with European regulations. We are in the EU and have benefited greatly from being in it, and that is very positive. We have a tendency, though, to gold-plate EU regulations and we really need to look at it. We are doing it because we are very good European citizens, but it comes at a cost in terms of delivery. An example is that we are working on a joint venture with a global engineering consultancy at the moment. We were tasked with providing an environmental impact statement on a project and it was a 200-page document that took months to prepare. The consultancy was aghast at this and said it was doing the same job, basically, in Spain and a two-page document was required. How can require a 200-page document when a two-page document is required in Spain? This all means delays and additional costs. It is about how we can streamline and strip back this process to ensure we are as efficient as possible.

I will give other examples of red tape. Every town in the country has SMEs, which are five-employee bands. There are one-off and bespoke contracts with the likes of housing agencies that the LDA and the HFA, etc., tend to use. It means the director, the senior person in a company with five people, who has no legal expertise has to negotiate the contracts. We are saying this is an utter waste of their time. We should be using standard contracts because these directors' time should be invested in designing projects and ensuring the designs are the best in class and not wasting their time getting into legal areas where they have no competence. There should be standardised contracts, which we have in our organisation, as an example, or, indeed, the public sector has them as well. These bodies I mentioned, though, tend to deviate from them. This is waste and red tape and we need to deal with it.

We have three very specific requests. We are asking for the immediate introduction of median pricing rather than the lowest price. We can all understand the logic of going with the lowest price when it comes to goods or whatever. When it comes to the work we do, though, which is intellectual services, the lowest price is an absolutely crazy way to select. What is being bought here is time and expertise and what the State is saying as a purchaser by using the lowest price is that it wants to pay for the least amount of time to design the project. I think that is crazy. There is an example of a project we worked on for which there were four prices. One price was €1.8 million, the second price was €1.1 million, the third price was €1 million and the last price was €500,000. If we look back there, I think most reasonable people would say the €500,000 price must be wrong and the company that offered it must have underestimated the complexity of the job. In the procurement system we have at the moment, even though quite often there is a tender that is the most economically advantageous, an abnormally low price sways the marking so much that the lowest tenderer is bound to be given the contract. It is a problem from the start to the finish. We even had the CEO of a local authority speaking to us recently who said that when this happens and it is seen who got the job and that it was the lowest price, they say “Oh no, this is going to be a problem from start to finish”. We therefore need to deal with procurement and median pricing is the way to go for intellectual services such as those we do. Mr. Finlay spoke about multi-annual funding and pipeline continuity. In fairness to the committee, I know it has reported on that and its importance, so I will not labour the point.

Turning to net contribution clauses, this is another major issue on public contracts in terms of risks for our members. This is to do with the Civil Liability Act 1961 and the fact that if you are found to be 1% liable you can be held 100% liable. This happened in 2008 when a lot of companies went into liquidation. I will give a very quick example. I am a structural engineer and I design the structure of a building. Let us take the example of the lighting in a school being found to be suboptimal and defective. Let us also suppose that the electrical engineer, the contractor and the other suppliers have gone bust. The client will have a situation where the lighting is suboptimal and people are slipping or it is damaging people’s eyes or whatever. As the structural engineer, I would have had nothing to do with that. Clearly, most reasonable people would say I had not. The argument then, though, might be one of asking me did I not realise when I walked into the building, given I have 30 years of experience, that the lighting was deficient. I would have to try to defend the fact that I am not 1% liable there, because if a court finds I am 1% liable, then I am 100% liable. This is a really problematic situation for our member firms in terms of our insurance costs. There is a complete absence of reasonableness and fairness. We are asking that net contribution clauses are introduced into Government contracts as a matter of urgency. It would make a massive difference for us and our ability to serve the State in terms of delivery on infrastructure.

We have detailed priorities, but they are in our submission, so I will not go through them all. I am conscious of time. We have detailed priorities across procurement, delivery and barriers. It is very much the same theme. Please help us to help the committee to help the State. If the committee supports us with the requests we have, we will play our part in that. I thank the committee very much.