Having sat on the supplier side of Irish tendering - at BidReview and in companies before it - the barriers that actually stop SMEs bidding are consistent, and they are not the ones the folklore describes. It is rarely a belief that the game is rigged. It is three practical problems: the cost of producing a serious tender response, no visibility of why some bids win and others lose, and no idea how much competition a given tender will attract.
Underneath all three sits a simple piece of business logic. A company does not need to win every tender, or most of them. It needs to win enough to make the effort worthwhile - and without knowing the odds, “enough” can’t even be estimated. Most SMEs don’t decline to play; they decline to bet blind.
The European Commission went looking for the same answer in 2021, with a study on SME needs in public procurement. It found the same list: low trust in the process, an administrative burden that demands resources SMEs don’t always have, and - above all - inefficient access to information. The conclusion it paid for is the one any supplier would have given it for free: what SMEs want most is better tools to see the opportunities, not easier rules.
So the useful question isn’t whether Irish procurement is fair. It’s whether the odds can be known. Increasingly, they can. We keep a register of companies recorded winning Irish public contracts through eTenders - at the last clean count, 2,099 distinct companies with a dated award between July 2023 and July 2026, across 3,554 published awards and more than 360 contracting authorities. Read alongside the European Court of Auditors’ 2023 audit of competition in EU procurement and the Office of Government Procurement’s own analysis, it puts numbers on each of the three problems.
“How much competition am I actually up against?”
Less than almost anyone assumes. The European Court of Auditors measured competition across EU procurement over a decade: between 2011 and 2021, the average number of bidders per above-threshold procedure fell from 5.7 to 3.2. The share of procedures attracting a single bid nearly doubled, to 41.8% - and over 40% of contract awards went to the only company that showed up. The Single Market Scoreboard recorded the single-bidder rate at a ten-year high in 2022.
The auditors treat this as a market problem, and for public value it is. For a supplier weighing whether a bid is worth the cost, it is the missing number: a typical procedure now attracts about three bids. That changes the arithmetic completely. A company that submits a handful of disciplined, well-matched bids a year is not buying lottery tickets against a crowded field - it is entering contests that a measurable share of the time have almost no field at all.
Participation, not capability, is the filter. An EU analysis of foreign bidding found only about 7% of European procurement authorities ever received a foreign bid, and concluded that low win rates reflected low participation rather than discrimination - as its author put it, there is no winning without trying. The Commission’s SME study found the domestic version of the same pattern: start-ups and young companies had the lowest participation rate of any enterprise category, and among the highest success rates when they did bid.
“Nobody can see who is winning what”
This is the complaint we hear most, and it is legitimate - the opacity is real and structural. Our own trends analysis found that in one recent six-month period, 59% of Irish awards had no published notice at all, flowing instead through frameworks, call-offs and direct awards. The state’s own account of the market - the OGP’s spend and tendering analysis - was last published for 2019. A supplier trying to size up a sector from public information is mostly guessing, and knows it.
That is why we built the register. And what the visible layer shows, once counted, is not what the guessing tends to assume:
- 77.5% of winning companies won exactly once in three years. Only 23 companies in the whole register have ten or more published wins. Whoever is winning, it is not a small fixed circle - the circle barely retains anyone.
- The leaders are specialists, not giants. In public software the most successful firms are names like Datapac and Micromail; the top five hold 8% of the category’s published awards between them. In marketing and research work no company holds more than four. Read down the register and it is a list of SMEs - niche consultancies, regional contractors, specialist suppliers. Household names barely feature in the published awards.
- The buyers are more local than expected. Over 360 authorities awarded contracts; the HSE, the largest single buyer, accounts for about one in twenty. County councils and universities out-award most government departments - and EU data shows around 40% of public contracts go to firms in the buyer’s own region, so proximity is a measured advantage that belongs to the local SME.
- The contracts, and the winners, are SME-sized. The median published contract value in the register is €200,000; the state’s own last analysis put the median advertised tender at €110,000 and found the majority of analysed public spend - 52% - going to SMEs.
None of this says the invisible layer doesn’t matter - it’s where large framework money moves, and the case for publishing it is one we make elsewhere. But the visible, open, cold-entry layer of the market - the only part a new bidder can walk into - produces over a hundred published awards a month, and it is being won by companies the same size as the ones staying out.
“Why do some bids win and others lose?”
The least visible part of the process is the evaluation itself - suppliers see the result, rarely the reasoning. But the mechanism is more knowable than it feels. The auditors’ data places Ireland among the member states least reliant on lowest-price awards: Irish buyers overwhelmingly score quality under published criteria and weightings. That matters more than it sounds - the Commission’s SME study identified price-dominated evaluation as a structural disadvantage for smaller firms without economies of scale, and noted that quality-oriented scoring creates opportunities for capable companies that lack a long track record. Ireland already runs the version of the system that favours them. Bids are marked against band descriptors by evaluators who have to justify every score, and the recurring difference between a mid-band mark and a winning one is specific, verifiable evidence - not connections, not scale, not prose style.
That has a practical consequence: the reasons bids lose are predictable, repeatable and mostly fixable before submission. The evaluation is opaque in the sense that you don’t see it happen; it is not opaque in the sense of being unknowable.
The cost problem - mostly solved, with a catch
The third barrier - the sheer cost of producing a tender response - is the one that has genuinely changed. AI has collapsed the cost of drafting: a compliant, fluent response that once took a team two weeks can now be produced in days. For SMEs that could deliver the work but couldn’t afford the bid, this removes a real exclusion.
The trouble with a falling barrier is that it falls for everyone. When every bidder can produce competent prose, competent prose stops scoring - and the deciding factor shifts even further toward what drafting tools can’t manufacture: the named contract, the measured outcome, the evidence an evaluator can point to when defending your mark.
The odds, stated plainly
Put the three answers together and the bet stops being blind. Competition per tender is thin and measured. The visible market is won by specialists and one-time entrants, at SME-sized values, by buyers who are often local. The evaluation rewards evidence against published criteria - the one input fully within a supplier’s control. And the cost of entering has fallen to the point where the constraint is no longer producing the bid, but producing a bid that scores.
A company doesn’t need to win them all. On these numbers, a disciplined bidder entering well-chosen tenders with evidenced answers doesn’t need luck to win enough - it needs a method, applied every time. We publish this count because we’re in the business of the method: BidReview scores tender responses the way Irish evaluation panels do, and doing that honestly requires knowing how those evaluations actually end.
See where your bid stands before an evaluator does. BidReview scores your live response against the published criteria - the same way the panel will. Run the free scorecard today.
