ABSTRACT
The exclusion of contracts below a minimum value is unique to Ireland. Why or how this exclusion came about is not clear. The Regulatory Impact Analysis of the Construction Contract Bill published in September 2011 does offer some insight. At the time of publication, the Bill was proposing that the legislation would not apply to contracts involving a state entity where the value of the contract was less than €50,000, or, in relation to the private sector, where the value of the contract was less than €200,000. According to the analysis: ‘it was considered that applying the legislation to contracts below these levels would place a disproportionate regulatory burden on the parties to the contracts’.1 However, the analysis goes on to point out that, according to the available statistics of the UK experience, the majority of disputes availing of adjudication were in relation to contracts valued between £10,000 and £50,000.2 One might infer, therefore, that the decision to exclude contracts with a value of less than €10,000 was made to avoid a disproportionate regulatory burden on the parties to the contracts. It is to be noted that no other country had considered it necessary to introduce such a safeguard, notwithstanding that amending legislation had been introduced in some. It is perhaps
surprising, therefore, that the Irish legislature identified a regulatory burden that no other country with actual experience of adjudication had noted.
