Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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In line with the Programme for Government: Our Shared Future, my Department’s focus is to further develop the potential of strategic procurement, with an emphasis on sustainability and social considerations, public works reform and innovation. My Department has taken a number of actions in this regard.

Through the inter-departmental Strategic Procurement Advisory Group, chaired by the Office of Government Procurement (OGP), my Department continues to promote the use of public procurement to address wider social and environmental challenges. To leverage the scale of public procurement, aggregating the State’s buying power, the OGP and its sourcing sector partners continue to establish central buying solutions that deliver value for money and provide for the inclusion of Government’s horizontal policy objectives, with a particular focus on measures that will help Ireland transition to a more sustainable future.

The Government recognises the importance of the SME sector and my Department continues to enhance the already substantial measures to support SMEs in accessing the public procurement market. Last March, my Department published Circular 05/2023: Initiatives to assist SMEs in Public Procurement, which replaced Circular 10/2014. The circular included a suite of policy measures aimed at assisting SMEs to access public procurement opportunities. My colleague, Minister of State Ossian Smyth, chairs the SME Advisory Group which meets quarterly and provides a forum for SMEs to discuss procurement issues.

My Department continues to develop a range of measures that will substantially improve the participation levels in public works tenders over the coming years. Recent and planned measures include:

• In July 2023, I, along with my colleague, Minister of State Smyth, published significant amendments to the Public Works Contract to provide greater certainty with respect to risk in response to continuing challenges in the construction market.
• My Department also announced the introduction of Building Information Modelling requirements commencing with public works projects with a value of €100m which are commencing stage (i) of the Capital Works Management Framework (CWMF) from January of this year.
• The OGP is liaising with the Government Contracts Committee for Construction and the Irish Green Building Council in developing standard metrics that can be applied to the evaluation of projects’ cost of use in service and full life cycle assessment, including the carbon impact of individual projects.
• In October 2023 revised Cost Control Templates were published under the CWMF to incorporate the International Cost Management Standard (ICMS). ICMS is a global standard for benchmarking and reporting of construction project cost and covers both capital and whole life costing while providing a way of presenting costs in a consistent format.
• The OGP is also engaging Information Technology expertise to develop a fully digital pre-qualification solution for public works projects which will reduce the administrative burden on contracting authorities and tenderers alike.

My Department will continue the enhancement and refinement of public procurement processes to address the needs of the State whilst adhering to the EU and National public procurement rules applying.