Mr. Shane Dempsey:

I will say one thing. The key thing we recommend is that this committee follows up on this report, which was produced by the Department of public expenditure. It involved a number of people from Uisce Éireann, Transport Infrastructure Ireland - the Government's own contracting authorities. It identified all the blockages everyone here has mentioned on the representative or private sector side. The Government's own contracting authorities are saying that the procurement system is inadequate and the Government contract is inadequate for modern construction and engineering projects and infrastructure delivery.

There will be another iteration of this report. The Minister mentioned it yesterday when he announced the capital increase for the budget. The key thing this committee could do is familiarise itself, as I am sure members are, with the measures here, ensuring they are in that report and that the Minister has that to remove barriers in future.

The key thing we see is that on net contribution clauses, we have been asking for years - long before my time - for fairness in Government contracts for consultant engineers, which are largely SMEs but which have to pay for insurance to cover all the potential mistakes of million-euro turnover contractors and suppliers they have never even encountered-----