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Buyer profile

How Waterways Ireland buys

Based on 309 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 Waterways Ireland's 306 contract awards placed through each procurement route, by award count and by awarded value. Value-weighting covers 41% of these awards (the share that disclosed a usable value); 3 qualification-system admissions (DPS / UQS) are reported separately and excluded from this mix.

Open-market98.4% of awards · 99.8% of value

301 awards, €117.2M of disclosed value

Limited-competition1.6% of awards · 0.2% of value

5 awards, €183k of disclosed value

Single-tender0.0% of awards · 0.0% of value

0 awards

Bids & SME access

Average bids per award

4.2

Average across 95 of 309 awards with a published bid count.

SME-access ratio

0.29

Pooled SME wins ÷ SME bids, across 83 of 309 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 109 of 309 awards that carry a published date. The open-market share here therefore rests on this dated subset.

YearOpen-market (count)Avg bidsSME accessDated awards
2013100.0%8.00.203
2014100.0%9.00.222
2015100.0%3.50.332
2016100.0%2.20.717
2017100.0%4.10.329
2018100.0%3.30.229
2019100.0%2.80.367
2020100.0%4.70.2213
202178.6%3.50.2314
202292.9%3.70.4714
2023100.0%4.60.459
2024100.0%3.80.3110
202580.0%3.30.135
2026100.0%8.00.145

By sector

Professional Services100.0% open-market · 113 awards
Construction100.0% open-market · 69 awards
Other92.6% open-market · 54 awards
Transport100.0% open-market · 30 awards
IT Services100.0% open-market · 20 awards
Environment93.8% open-market · 19 awards
Facilities100.0% open-market · 2 awards
Healthcare100.0% open-market · 1 award
Defence100.0% 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 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.