Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I do not think this is happening and that there is proper enforcement of this. The Office of Government Procurement and the Minister of State should be putting pressure on the relevant Departments to ensure this happens. I mention Western Building Systems, which built a school in Whitehall that I understand has been sitting empty for perhaps a decade because it is structurally unsound. We then discovered that five of the schools it built were fire defective. We are then told there will be a report into the other 30 schools it built. That report was promised in September to be out in six months but it is not out. All of this suggests to me that there is not a seriousness about getting to the bottom of why companies in receipt of public money are doing substandard work. We are not bothered to look into it and we are not excluding them from further public contracts.

I mentioned bogus self employment. We hear the advertisements at the moment, and it is good the Government is raising the issue, but there have been widespread examples of contractors doing work for the State where they were found to have been, as in the case of Rhatigans, engaged in bogus self employment.

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