Ms Patricia Callan:

InterTradeIreland has been exceptional in this regard, running very useful "meet the buyer" events in many parts of the country that have been very positively received. As we move towards specialised category councils, the idea in the new framework is that the Office of Government Procurement will come to the market and talk to us before producing the tenders in the first place. It will be about training per contract or per category council, and getting in front of the people who are buying for the specialists in that industry. It is only by doing this that everybody will up their game. As I said at the launch of Circular 10/14, unless we make feedback mandatory, we are at nothing. If a company has not been successful in a tender, there must be information given as to why it was not successful. That is not happening at the moment because, we are told, it takes too much time, but all these small companies are expected to spend time writing tenders. One will never learn and improve if one does not get feedback.