EU PRESIDENCY: Transport services

The Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) has criticised the Department of Foreign Affairs for the manner in which the provision of road transport services during Ireland's EU presidency last year was put out to tender.

The C&AG also notes in his annual report that the cost of Ireland hosting the presidency was just over €32 million.

The report says that the Department of Foreign Affairs paid more than €965,000 to a single contractor in respect of road transport services during the EU presidency.

However, the department did not apply the appropriate procurement procedure for securing this contract. It says that under national and EU procurement procedures for services on this scale, an open tendering competition should have been put in place.

However, the department used a negotiated tendering process which is permitted only in exceptional circumstances or in the case of extreme urgency or an unforeseen event.

The C&AG says that the accounting officer, the secretary general of the Department of Foreign Affairs, had acknowledged that it should have placed a formal notice in the official EU journal (setting out an open tender process) and regretted that it had not done so.

The Department of Foreign Affairs maintained that lengthy and complex negotiations over the provision of the sponsorship of transport services by the private sector had been responsible for the decision not to employ an open tendering procedure.

For the first time in an Irish EU presidency, private-sector sponsorship arrangements for services were put in place in 2004.

These generated savings of around €3.5 million.

However, Cabinet approval for such arrangements was only secured in April 2003, and an agreement on the transport sponsorship, worth €1.8 million, was not finalised until October 2003.

The Department of Foreign Affairs maintained that, until this sponsorship offer was agreed, the precise transport requirements for the presidency could not be fully known.

The report says that the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs said that one of the lessons of the presidency was that any such sponsorship agreements should be concluded a considerable time before the presidency.