Buyer profile
How SOLAS buys
Based on 143 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 SOLAS's 143 contract awards placed through each procurement route, by award count and by awarded value. Value-weighting covers 57% of these awards (the share that disclosed a usable value); there are no qualification-system admissions to exclude.
135 awards, €55.3M of disclosed value
7 awards, €2.2M of disclosed value
1 award, €1.9M of disclosed value
Bids & SME access
Average bids per award
5.3
Average across 75 of 143 awards with a published bid count.
SME-access ratio
0.27
Pooled SME wins ÷ SME bids, across 59 of 143 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 103 of 143 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 100.0% | — | — | 2 |
| 2017 | 100.0% | — | — | 1 |
| 2018 | 100.0% | 3.4 | — | 10 |
| 2019 | 100.0% | 6.8 | 0.14 | 9 |
| 2020 | 100.0% | 6.3 | 0.31 | 3 |
| 2021 | 100.0% | 6.9 | 0.20 | 17 |
| 2022 | 100.0% | 2.8 | 0.45 | 10 |
| 2023 | 66.7% | 5.0 | — | 3 |
| 2024 | 88.2% | 4.2 | 0.51 | 17 |
| 2025 | 81.8% | 5.1 | 0.39 | 22 |
| 2026 | 88.9% | 7.0 | 0.16 | 9 |
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.