Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 24 October 2019
Public Accounts Committee
Business of Committee
9:00 am
Mr. Seamus McCarthy:
Yes. Deputy Cullinane mentioned ICT as being one of the areas where there is a lot of non-competitive procurement. Very often that is because a purchaser is locked into a particular supplier. There are kinds of proprietary goods or services being supplied. In a way, that is not really where the non-competitive, non-compliant issue arises. We have to look at it, though, over a ten-year period, if we are locking into a technology. That arises certainly with HSE and in the medical sphere, where a technology is bought and they are then locked into a maintenance contract for parts and replacement and so on.