Thomas Pringle (Donegal South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am generally concerned about how this is policed and enforced. For many years, contractors had to be compliant with the construction industry pension scheme. I do not know about national bodies, but local authorities turned a blind eye to it because they were getting the contractors at the most competitive price. I raised it with Donegal County Council a number of years ago. When it started forcing contractors to comply, companies registered one employee and got a letter of compliance from the Construction Industry Federation saying that they were part of a pension scheme, which got over the difficulty for them. It is an ongoing problem that needs to be looked at. For example, if an authority has had a difficulty with a contractor in the past, could it exclude the contractor from future contracts? Could it adopt that position and would it be defensible?

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