Thomas Pringle (Donegal South West, Independent)
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94. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine if he will provide a breakdown of the spend by his Department on external IT consultancies and contractors; if he will list any firm or contractor that has received over €1 million in total over the past three years; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [6347/14]

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in my Department underpins the administration of €2.5bn in EU and Exchequer funds annually and the maintenance and development of award winning animal traceability and health computer systems that process millions of births, movements and tests annually. The ICT infrastructure and systems underpin the huge range of farming and industry supports as well as providing the animal traceability and food safety systems behind a sector with €26 billion in turnover and €10 billion in exports. The advanced use of information technology in my Department has contributed significantly to the substantial reduction in the cost of running my Department from €303 million in 2008 to €216 million allocated for 2014.

In addition to contributing to the very substantial internal reforms carried out within my Department, as part of the Public Service Reform Plan recently announced by my colleague Minister Howlin, we have been very active in the Shared Services Reform Programme and my Department supplies significant ICT shared services from within our own resources to various state agencies such as Teagasc, the Sea Fisheries Protection Authority and Bord Bia and to other Government Departments such as the Department of the Taoiseach, the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources and the Department of Public Expenditure. This has provided significant savings.

My Department uses ICT external support to augment our own internal ICT teams primarily in the development and support of a range of major systems. These contractors supply certain specialist ICT services (in particular Java programming and database support) when such proves to be more cost effective and where sufficient, suitably skilled Departmental staff, are not available. While the expenditure on ICT external support is significant, it is in line with that of other large organisations, that also have a significant operational dependence on ICT and it is also reasonable relative to the scale of our operations. Savings are achieved on an ongoing basis by leveraging maximum value from existing investments, utilising Open EU procurement processes and frameworks, negotiating reductions on contracts and software licences, and careful management of resources for software development.

This commitment to utilising modern technology has enabled us to do more with less and continue to provide our existing services to the expected high standard whilst also planning for the future of our service delivery in the context of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) reform, and our ambitious Food Harvest 2020 growth targets.

Breakdown of expenditure for 2013 on external IT consultancies contractors and outsourcing

ICT Contracts worth €1M+ from 2011-2013