Public Procurement

REVIEW OF PUBLIC PROCUREMENT REGIME

The European Committee of the Regions adopted its evaluation of the Public Procurement Directives in the context of the revision of the Public Procurement Directives. The European Commission is scheduled to have an orientation debate on 3 June 2026 and to announce the Public Procurement Act on 3 July 2026.

AUTOMATIC SUSPENSION

In a Portuguese procurement challenge in C-266/25 and C-267/25, in response to preliminary questions on the Remedies Directive, Advocate General Campos Sánchez-Bordona opined that the Directive:

• prevents national legislation pursuant to which, where it is merely demonstrated that a contract is financed or co-financed by European funds, a national court must provisionally lift the automatic suspensive effect of an application for review of the decision awarding a public contract;
• does not prevent national legislation pursuant to which a court has the power to weigh up all the public and private interests at stake to assess whether the damage which would result from maintaining the automatic suspension would be greater than that resulting from lifting it. Such interests may include, as an additional but not necessarily overriding assessment criterion, preventing the loss of European financing of the project covered by the contract.

EXCLUSION OF TENDERERS

Case C-268/25 concerns a request for a preliminary ruling relating to exclusion of tenderers under the Public Contracts Directive and Utilities Directive, under which economic operators that have submitted a tender and have not fulfilled their obligation to pay taxes on time are to be mandatorily excluded from the procurement procedure. The Advocate General had to consider whether, in an ongoing procurement, an economic operator belonging to a temporary grouping of undertakings had to fulfil its obligation to pay taxes to avoid exclusion, and whether and under what conditions the grouping could exclude or substitute such a member on its own initiative.

Advocate General Kokott proposes that the Court holds that the legislation and the principle of proportionality prevent national rules whereby a temporary grouping of undertakings must be excluded from a public procurement procedure because it cannot exclude or substitute one of its members which fulfilled its obligation to settle its tax debts only after the expiration of the tender submission deadline (merely because it proposed doing so only after it was informed of the member’s omissions by the contracting authority).

CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE BILL

As mentioned in other sections, the Critical Infrastructure Bill 2026 has been passed by Dáil Éireann and is under consideration by the Seanad, with a target enactment date of mid-June 2026. Our briefing on the Bill is available here: Accelerating Infrastructure: Critical Infrastructure Bill and Circulars.

DEFENCE PROCUREMENT

The Industrial Development (Amendment) and Miscellaneous Provisions Bill 2026, currently before Dáil Éireann, would delete section 8(5) of the Science and Technology Act 1987, which prevents Enterprise Ireland, IDA and Science Foundation Ireland from engaging in or promoting any activity of a primarily military relevance without the prior approval of the Government. The intent is to allow these agencies to engage with and support enterprises in the defence, security and resilience sphere in the same way as with enterprises in other sectors.

NATIONAL PUBLIC PROCUREMENT STRATEGY

Publication of a National Public Procurement Strategy is anticipated, as indicated at the CSSO public procurement law conference 2026.