Buyer profile
How The Arts Council buys
Based on 220 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 The Arts Council's 219 contract awards placed through each procurement route, by award count and by awarded value. Value-weighting covers 40% of these awards (the share that disclosed a usable value); 1 qualification-system admissions (DPS / UQS) are reported separately and excluded from this mix.
215 awards, €27.2M of disclosed value
3 awards, €413k of disclosed value
1 award, €182k of disclosed value
Bids & SME access
Average bids per award
3.6
Average across 145 of 220 awards with a published bid count.
SME-access ratio
0.29
Pooled SME wins ÷ SME bids, across 124 of 220 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 157 of 220 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 100.0% | 2.6 | — | 9 |
| 2015 | 100.0% | 1.8 | 0.56 | 6 |
| 2016 | 100.0% | 1.0 | 1.00 | 5 |
| 2017 | 100.0% | 2.9 | 0.33 | 11 |
| 2018 | 100.0% | 3.6 | 0.30 | 12 |
| 2019 | 100.0% | 3.8 | 0.29 | 19 |
| 2020 | 100.0% | 4.4 | 0.28 | 19 |
| 2021 | 100.0% | 4.6 | 0.30 | 15 |
| 2022 | 100.0% | 3.7 | 0.29 | 29 |
| 2023 | 100.0% | 7.0 | 0.12 | 3 |
| 2024 | 90.0% | 3.4 | 0.20 | 10 |
| 2025 | 94.4% | 3.6 | 0.29 | 18 |
| 2026 | 0.0% | — | — | 1 |
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.