Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill and I commend Deputies Mairéad Farrell and Patricia Ryan on introducing it. There are a number of issues with tenders and contracts. Some construction companies will submit exceptionally low bids just to secure a contract. That leads to a chain of events. Often in the middle of a project the contractor will then come back looking for more cash. It cannot be moved off-site easily. There are some good examples of major contracts not too far from this building where contractors cannot be moved. It is not possible to demobilise them and remobilise another construction company on-site. There are difficulties with getting companies to finish the works of a previous contractor. Construction companies that bid too low with an unrealistic price through lack of professionalism or not having the competence to assess the project properly should also raise red flags. The definition set out in the Bill is a serious attempt to put some shape on this so that we do not fall into these situations on major public contracts.

Exceptionally low prices can also lead to shoddy workmanship. Following work on the school bundles, the taxpayer had to go in and pick it up because there was nobody on-site checking to see if the bricklayers put metal wall ties in between each second row of blocks. These ties work out at about 9 cent each but they were not dropped in because nobody was there watching them, which was shoddy workmanship. The work then had to be redone.

Past performance is very important and I welcome that it has been specified in the Bill. We should be able to consider poor performance in the past. Too often public contracts have gone out to firms where there are red flags because of their previous track record. Where a company has no track record, its competence now needs to be seriously assessed. The Bill addresses those points.

Deputy Mairéad Farrell mentioned some of the other consequences of this, including bogus self-employment. As Chairman of the Committee of Public Accounts, I have seen more than enough examples of bogus self-employment in the past 15 months in a range of areas but particularly in the construction sector.

We need to move on further than this. Sometimes Ministers throw their hands up and say they cannot do anything about it. When we are spending taxpayers' money, we should not just get the job done but get the best public and social good out of it along the way. We need to insert provisions insisting that companies pay the living wage. That is what the Sinn Féin Minister in the North has done. The Tánaiste often challenges Sinn Féin to do this, that and the other in the North - things over which we have no control and which are set down by the diktat of the Tory government. However, where we have the control, we are doing it.

The Sinn Féin Minister up there stepped up to the plate and has insisted that for any public contract works the company must pay the living wage. Workers should be getting proper overtime rates. The rights of workers to join a trade union must be recognised. We cannot have the misclassification of workers as bogus self-employed when they are really employees. Numerous people have come to me in the last three or four years about this. Bogus self-employment is a big scandal and it needs to be stopped.

I welcomed this Bill as a step in the right direction to deal with the issue of below-cost contracts which lead to many of the issues we have just raised. I welcome that consideration of past performance is central to the Bill. Often the Government will stop our Bills just for the sake of stopping them or bury them at a committee. If there is a good idea, it does not matter who it comes from and whether it comes from the right, left or centre, or whether the Government likes the party it comes from. If an idea a good, we should embrace it. That is what leads to a successful society.

I ask the Minister of State to take the Bill on board and hopefully we can progress it.

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