Mr. John Murphy:

There will be a referendum on the unified patent court. If we are transferring sovereignty from the Irish courts to an international court then it is not an EU institution and, therefore, is not covered by Article 29 of the Constitution that provides for certain things to be done under the EU rubric. Work needs to be done on the specification for the court and so on and it would be necessary to have that done before a referendum is held.

As the committee will know, there are a number of possible referendums, including one that we are certain of this September. The unified patent court referendum is likely to take place in the latter half of 2014. Such timing would allow for the degree of certainty that one needs to operate the court. It would also enable the Government to take a number of decisions that are relevant to the court before the overall matter of the jurisdiction is put to a referendum.

We have discussed public procurement issues before. Deputy Calleary mentioned that the public procurement policy is a matter for the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. Recently it appointed a new chief procurement officer. As I have mentioned here before, there are conflicting policy objectives. There is definitely a need to ensure we have efficiency in public procurement which often means a focus on saving money, economies of scale, etc.

The other policy objective that we particularly focus on is ensuring there is as much openness to SMEs and Irish firms as possible in the public procurement market. We are often quoted statistics to the effect that a very high percentage of public procurement contracts go to Irish firms, most of which are SMEs, certainly if one uses the European definition. On the other hand, there is a fair bit of anecdotal evidence on particular types of tenders and people feel that the conditions of the tender exclude them.

The focus of our interaction with the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform has been on ways to get better SME involvement. Let me give an example. We examine restrictive clauses in public procurement tenders to do with insurance bonds, for example, and things like that. If the clauses are set at too high a level firms can be excluded. We also focus on facilitating SMEs in order for them to come forward with innovative solutions rather than over specify what needs to be provided. We try to encourage people to come forward with solutions. We have worked with Enterprise Ireland and a range of actors in the public sector to advance that agenda and will continue to do so.

The public procurement directives relevant to this discussion were about simplifying administrative procedures and facilitating the use of e-procurement. The EU spends approximately €2 trillion per annum on public procurement which is a huge amount of money and about 19% of EU GDP. If we are serious about opening up the Single Market then there are significant opportunities in procurement. We work closely with Enterprise Ireland, for example, and help companies to internationalise, identify and avail of opportunities. Turnover requirements have been explicitly limited to twice the size of a contract. Therefore, one should not set very high levels of turnover that SMEs cannot meet, it is possible to divide contracts into smaller lots and there will be detailed monitoring by the Commission on SME participation.

I understand Deputy Calleary referred to the Commission's definition of SMEs. Is that less than 500 or 250 employees?