Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)
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The person who actually buys the goods is responsible. In other words, the contracting authority or procurement person in that particular public sector body is responsible for following the rules. Among the reasons such persons do not follow the rules are that they do not know how to do so, it is just not easy or they are used to doing it the old way. That is why the Office of Government Procurement prepared a tool called the GPP criteria tool. When one is writing a procurement tender, this tool generates the green criteria which are measurable and objective. What you do not want to do is put into your tender that the textile or paper supplied should be good for the environment. What you want is the exact specification of how it should be green and how that should be measurable. The GPP criteria tool does that. That has been widely deployed and very useful.

It has given a degree of consistency across public procurement no matter who is buying.