Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

These stories of the delivery of substandard medical equipment to the HSE underline the importance of having central procurement. The aims of public procurement are to make sure that we achieve a good price for the State, obtain a quality product with basic standards and have transparency, whereby we know deals are fair and non-discriminatory. In an atmosphere of emergency procurement, when facing a crisis as great as the global pandemic, of course the three pillars of procurement are skipped and the State runs the risks of obtaining a low-quality product and overpaying for goods. It also runs the risk of a failure in transparency whereby we must ask whether we are sure funds have been correctly allocated. What the Deputy has described just underlines the reasons we have public procurement in place and the importance of having it.

It is possible to obtain goods in an emergency by short-circuiting or bypassing the normal public procurement procedures. While some of the PPE that was delivered to Ireland was unusable and substandard, 80% of it, I believe, was acceptable. If we cast our minds back to the time when health business services representatives of the HSE were on a runway in China trying to negotiate against other countries to obtain vital PPE to protect front-line healthcare workers and elderly people in nursing homes, we must recall that they had to get PPE virtually at any cost. They had to get it back to Ireland. They succeeded with the help of Aer Lingus and the heroic help of many people across the public and private sectors, who joined together and brought back as much PPE as they could. I understand that the HSE currently has a great surplus of PPE and has a supply that is expected to last for many more years than first believed. It is true, however, that some of the PPE was substandard, and that underlines the importance of having public procurement guidelines in place.

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