Irish Examiner view: Schools should not have to deal with the eTender system
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As comfort blankets go, they don’t come much larger than the collective security of the EU with 27 nations bending towards the future with a common purpose.
Ireland has had good cause to count the benefits of being part of a larger whole, most notably during the covid pandemic when the collective purchasing power of the community ensured that our small country had a place at the table in the early days when the squeeze was on to obtain vaccines.
But being part of a club means that you have to abide by its rules, and when that it is coupled with apparently well-meaning changes in national government policy, then the law of unintended consequences can catch you on the blind side.
And so it seems when a tightening of the EU’s procurement and tendering procedures — carried out online to ensure consistency and transparency — became intertwined with the Government’s free schoolbooks scheme to move the financial burden of providing set texts away from families.
Unfortunately, there have been a number of unanticipated results, because the Department of Education placed responsibility on schools to organise purchase, rather than allocating vouchers to parents to buy the books.
This has principals and headteachers up in arms because it asks them to add skills normally associated with a quantity surveyor to their quiver of responsibilities.
If a school now needs to order books costing more than €50,000, it is obliged under EU law to put it out to tender, and select a single supplier who must supply hundreds of books in a once-off delivery, by August, preferably sooner.
Booksellers Ireland lobbied hard for vouchers to be placed in the hands of qualifying parents. They were ignored, and we are now witnessing another example of schemes devised to suit the prevailing nostrums of technocrats who possess little grasp of how things work in the real world.
Booksellers Ireland chairwoman Dawn Behan said: “Small bookshops don’t have the cash flow or the manpower to deal with the eTender system.
"Even if you get the tender, you’re talking about having €50,000 available to buy the books in the first place to deliver to the school and then invoice the school to get the money back.
Larger-scale operators such as Eason have joined the clamour, claiming that the scheme cost it €2.5m from lost footfall last year. But industry insiders fear many smaller bookshops will close with the impending expansion of the scheme to 213,000 junior cycle students in 672 post-primary schools this September.
Since the rollout to all primary school children last autumn, nine bookshops have closed around the country, with some explicitly blaming the free schoolbook scheme.
Planners have clearly misunderstood the relationship between schools and their local bookshops and the impact that this has on small businesses and local employment. Independents describe the change as “a crushing blow”. And it will be.
It doesn’t need a master’s degree in economics to appreciate the ancillary benefits of 100 families visiting a shop and making additional purchases compared to collection from one-drop off point at a school.
As might be expected, the Department of Education is defending the new process. And it must hope that the 728 school principals and 1,003 deputy principals tasked with buying the books through eTenders, start to get with the programme.
“It’s nuts,” one told the . “There’s genuine anger” and “it’s nonsense”, said others.
This catalogue of complaints is not going to diminish. Efficiency is great. But if that was the objective, you might wonder why its instigators didn’t go the whole hog and outsource all the transactions to Amazon. Perhaps that is next year’s project?
Over the next few days, we can expect many columns of interpretation from political analysts, commentators, and psephologists on the meaning of this weekend’s set of results from the local elections and the European elections.
Those from Europe are still to arrive, but in Ireland the local numbers are already being crunched and deductions made. What has happened to Sinn Féin? How stand the Independents? How went the move to the right? How have the Greens stood up? Does this make an autumn election more or less appealing for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil?
While the entrails are being pored over and the runes read, there is a perennial question which is worth repeating. Why does around half of Ireland’s electorate fail to cast votes for Europe?
It is not as if people can be unaware of the ever-increasing influence of Brussels and Strasbourg. Our commentary above on the plight of small booksellers is one among many contemporary examples. Environmental policies, transport, agriculture, fisheries, technology, competition, copyright, interest rates, immigration... all are shaped by the guiding hand of the European Commission and the guiding spirit of the European Parliament and its 720 MEPs. They provide the framework inside which national governments operate.
The European elections are the only opportunity citizens get to directly affect EU decision-making.
Across the continent some 373m people have had the opportunity to do so. If you took it up, then you can look in the mirror this morning and know that you have made a contribution to democracy.