Buyer profile
How Irish Defence Forces buys
Based on 628 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 Irish Defence Forces's 628 contract awards placed through each procurement route, by award count and by awarded value. Value-weighting covers 68% of these awards (the share that disclosed a usable value); there are no qualification-system admissions to exclude.
626 awards, €409.7M of disclosed value
0 awards
2 awards, €8.0M of disclosed value
Bids & SME access
Average bids per award
2.9
Average across 345 of 628 awards with a published bid count.
SME-access ratio
0.39
Pooled SME wins ÷ SME bids, across 291 of 628 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 382 of 628 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% | 1.7 | — | 3 |
| 2014 | 100.0% | 1.4 | 0.75 | 13 |
| 2015 | 100.0% | 1.3 | 0.96 | 27 |
| 2016 | 100.0% | 1.4 | 1.00 | 32 |
| 2017 | 100.0% | 2.1 | 0.80 | 15 |
| 2018 | 100.0% | 2.4 | 0.50 | 23 |
| 2019 | 100.0% | 2.6 | 0.36 | 29 |
| 2020 | 100.0% | 3.5 | 0.37 | 29 |
| 2021 | 100.0% | 5.6 | 0.17 | 45 |
| 2022 | 100.0% | 3.4 | 0.35 | 27 |
| 2023 | 100.0% | 2.6 | 0.39 | 36 |
| 2024 | 100.0% | 2.0 | 0.53 | 40 |
| 2025 | 100.0% | 3.8 | 0.30 | 51 |
| 2026 | 100.0% | 2.3 | 0.48 | 12 |
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.