Buyer profile
How iarnrod-eireann-irish-rail buys
Based on 2,025 recorded award notices in the OGP data (2024–2026). Procedure type is recorded for every award; bid-count and SME figures are shown only where the underlying counts are published. All figures are recorded facts from the award data.
Competitive-procedure mix
Share of iarnrod-eireann-irish-rail's 1,831 contract awards placed through each procurement route, by award count and by awarded value. Value-weighting covers 38% of these awards (the share that disclosed a usable value); 194 qualification-system admissions (DPS / UQS) are reported separately and excluded from this mix.
1,001 awards, €8697.0M of disclosed value
617 awards, €199.3M of disclosed value
213 awards, €641k of disclosed value
Bids & SME access
Average bids per award
5.0
Average across 569 of 2,025 awards with a published bid count.
SME-access ratio
0.29
Pooled SME wins ÷ SME bids, across 348 of 2,025 awards with published SME bid counts.
The SME-access ratio is a pooled rate (total SME awards divided by total SME bids), not an average of per-award rates. A higher ratio means a larger share of SME bids resulted in an award.
Year-by-year trend
Computed across the 847 of 2,025 awards that carry a published date. The open-market share here therefore rests on this dated subset.
| Year | Open-market (count) | Avg bids | SME access | Dated awards |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 100.0% | 1.0 | 1.00 | 2 |
| 2014 | 100.0% | 2.8 | 0.50 | 5 |
| 2015 | 100.0% | 3.1 | — | 13 |
| 2016 | 100.0% | 1.5 | 1.00 | 28 |
| 2017 | 100.0% | 1.9 | 0.80 | 52 |
| 2018 | 100.0% | 1.7 | 0.63 | 55 |
| 2019 | 76.4% | 4.1 | 0.34 | 72 |
| 2020 | 55.8% | 5.8 | 0.24 | 77 |
| 2021 | 72.3% | 7.5 | 0.18 | 83 |
| 2022 | 69.7% | 6.2 | 0.31 | 68 |
| 2023 | 85.5% | 6.2 | 0.32 | 87 |
| 2024 | 35.8% | 4.9 | 0.21 | 109 |
| 2025 | 38.4% | 4.7 | 0.24 | 125 |
| 2026 | 43.7% | 5.7 | 0.27 | 71 |
By sector
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Data & licence
Contains Irish Public Sector Data licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence. Computed deterministically from the Office of Government Procurement contract-award records published ondata.gov.ie. Open-market routes are the Open, Restricted, Simplified, Competitive Dialogue and Competitive-with-Negotiation procedures; limited-competition routes are mini-competitions and quick quotes; single-tender is the negotiated procedure without prior publication. Generated 2026-08-02.