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Buyer profile

How The Arts Council buys

Based on 53 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 53 contract awards placed through each procurement route, by award count and by awarded value. Value-weighting covers 100% of these awards (the share that disclosed a usable value); there are no qualification-system admissions to exclude.

Open-market 92.5% of awards · 93.2% of value

49 awards , €8.1M of disclosed value

Limited-competition 5.7% of awards · 4.7% of value

3 awards , €413k of disclosed value

Single-tender 1.9% of awards · 2.1% of value

1 award , €182k of disclosed value

Bids & SME access

Average bids per award

3.5

Average across 24 of 53 awards with a published bid count.

SME-access ratio

0.27

Pooled SME wins ÷ SME bids, across 18 of 53 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 29 of 53 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
2024 90.0% 3.4 0.20 10
2025 94.4% 3.6 0.29 18
2026 0.0% 1

By sector

Professional Services 87.0% open-market · 23 awards
Other 100.0% open-market · 20 awards
IT Services 88.9% open-market · 9 awards
Education 100.0% open-market · 1 award

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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 on data.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 2026-06-27.