Gerard P. Craughwell demands transparency in public procurement

Minister, welcome to the House. This is my first time to address you as Minister and congratulations on your elevation and the very best of luck as you go forward. Public procurement, you said at the outset that you were responsible for the purchase of everything from major projects right down to toilet rolls for national schools. And that is a massive undertaking for any department to have oversight of. Central procurement is all fine and dandy, where I find, particularly in the area of schools, I'm not sure how it operates now, but I had principals come in to me saying that some of the stuff they were forced to purchase through centralised purchasing, they could purchase far cheaper on the open market. And they wondered why they were tied into centralised purchasing. So maybe that's something you can look at in your own spare time, if you ever get any, at least. The idea that we centralise everything seems a great idea, but some things are not suitable to centralisation. But I want to talk about accountability now with respect to public procurement. We spent four years, the last four years, following the procurement of Ireland's search and rescue contract. There were serious problems we envisaged in that contract, myself and others. The Joint Oireachtas Committee tried on five occasions to have the Secretary General of the Department to come before the Department and answer questions. The Secretary General refused. He gave a number of different reasons. He refused to come in under a camera hearing where it would be in private session. He said anything he did had to be in public. He refused to come in under public session because he was advised, he said, by the Attorney General not to attend. He refused on a second attempt for a public hearing. On the third attempt, he quoted the EU, paragraph 17 or something. I read the full document, paragraph 85 said, they are responsible and answerable to the Oireachtas. We were not a tendering agency, we were an oversight body. And finally, he accused the Joint Oireachtas Committee of having a bias member on the committee. Right? Now, the bottom line on it is, his last words were, secondary generals are not answerable to committees. That's what ministers are for. But I had a letter from the Joint Ministers saying they had no oversight of the contract. We wonder how we finish up with a children's hospital fiasco. That's how we finish up with it. Where the people on the ground making decisions, ministers can't be everywhere. The portfolios of ministers in this government are mind-boggling. I don't know how you get time to do anything. But at the end of the day, somebody has to be answerable to the Joint Oireachtas Committee. Somebody has to be prepared to come before the Joint Oireachtas Committee. Looking at the paperwork in the search and rescue contract, it was all about covering themselves. We had an aviation expert. But was that person an aviation expert? We find that that person was not a pilot. We find that that person employed one person himself. We find that that company had one contract, Ireland. 800 million euros of a contract. And everything we said about that contract going sour has turned to pass. It was supposed to be taken over by July of this year. It will not now be taken over until 2026. And everything about it has been a disaster. So the bottom line on it is, for your protection, Minister, and the protection of those dedicated public servants you have in your department, we need a far more transparent approach to public procurement. We need to be able to, as members of the Oireachtas, we need to be able to raise issues directly with the department involved and with the principal officer, Assistant Sec Gen, or Secretary Gen, who is making the decisions. We need the decision maker to come before Joint Oireachtas Committees. Everything my colleague said from Wexford, I fully support. He's 100% correct. For the small to medium businesses, the micro industry, they have to have a simplified method of entering into public contracts. And I would support everything he's saying there. It's not the small contracts that bothers me. It's the ginormous ones. The ones that run to millions. And what do we do when something goes wrong? We fire the minister. That's what we do. And at the end of the day, when you have a minister writing to me saying, I have no oversight of this contract, signed by the two ministers responsible, who then is responsible? Where do we turn? Public procurement is the largest single expenditure this country has. And we really need, I mean, very soon we'll be buying, recently we, for example, bought four helicopters for the Air Corps. I understand they were bought without going to tender. They simply went to the supplier and said, give us four helicopters. How is that good value for money? Why isn't there a competition? I know EU rules allow for direct purchase without competition in the defence area. But, again, it's a question of oversight. It'll be interesting to see what we're paying for each of those helicopters and what other countries are paying for them when there is no competition. I really do, I was looking at the search and rescue one, and there was a company used to oversee the paperwork. I'm not going to name the company here because I'm sure they do a good job, right? But they do a good job of checking to make sure the I's were dotted and the T's were crossed. They have no expertise in the actual what's required for the job. They are not aviators. They're just people who look at contracts and say, yeah, that contract is good. That contract has all the necessary requirements. So you have an aviation expert who's a one-man operation. You have an oversight outside agency who says all the right things have been done. But really and truly, the Joint Oireachtas Committee needs to be able to interrogate the aviation expert. Who are you? What are your qualifications? How can you do this? The same would apply to any engineering job that's undertaken in the state. The same would apply to any major development. We need to be able to talk to the people that are advising our departments. I think you'll agree with me. If you look across Europe, we have become risk-averse in public service. I was talking about it in January. Art and Crusher was 20% of our GDP. Imagine the minister and the civil servants that signed off on that. The most imaginative people that you ever had. Everybody was against what they were doing, including the Department of Finance. But they ploughed a hill and we had electricity all over Ireland at the end of the Art and Crusher project. We need that sort of risk-taking to come back into the public service. We need public servants that are not afraid of losing their pensions if they make a mistake. We all make mistakes. And if it happens, it happens. There's nothing worse than this morning that Honestha had to announce that the National Children's Hospital will not now open for another three months. It's going to miss its opening date by another three months. And I'm sure that frustrates the hell out of the good people in your department who are trying to move things along. And in the Department of Health and in the HSE and in any other organisation that's involved. So really what I want you to do when you take on this, and I really appreciate your speech. It was a vision of a future in public service and public procurement. And I'd like to see that vision come to pass. But what I would like to see is I would like to see all of the other departments buying into it and accepting that your vision is the vision they should employ. And let's get some serious work done. And finally, my colleague from Wexford, 100% agree with him. Let's get the little guys in this country making money out of the procurement in this country. And let's not give it all to major multinationals. So thank you for your time, Minister, and the very best of luck. Thank you.