Reform of the public service might start by incorporating into relevant government departments some of the independent but publicly funded agencies working in the same areas, writes NIAMH HARDIMAN.
TWENTY YEARS ago, Ireland had seven junior ministers and far fewer State agencies. Today we have 20 junior ministers, up from 17 since the last government, in addition to 15 full Ministers. And if the recent Review of the Irish Public Service by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is correct, State agencies that may now number more than 800.
Why this apparent proliferation in the bureaucracy of what is, after all, a small country? Many nominations to the boards of State agencies are made by Ministers; junior ministries are a sign of political advancement. Are we seeing "jobs for the boys and girls" on a grand scale, and do we need all these jobs?
A research project at UCD suggests that the picture is a bit more complicated*. Government has taken on a wider range of functions and responsibilities over the last 20 years. But where many of these might previously have been managed within government departments, now there is a growing tendency to create stand-alone agencies to carry out these tasks. Whether or not there is scope for rationalisation depends on what we think the agencies are doing - and indeed on how many there actually are.
Ireland has a Civil Service structure that organises responsibilities by sector but many policy areas overlap single departmental competences.
One of the ways of giving organisational focus to a cross-cutting policy area is to appoint a minister of State in that area. For example, disability is known to be a special concern of Taoiseach Brian Cowen. The new Minister of State for Disability (and Equality and Mental Health), John Moloney, has an appointment that attaches him to four departments - Health and Children; Education and Science; Enterprise, Trade and Employment; and Justice, Equality and Law Reform.
Appointment of a junior minister may bring focus to policy initiatives but there is no guarantee that the policies will have effective outcomes. Minister of State appointments are often intended to provide an organisational solution to the difficulties involved in co-ordinating policy initiatives across departments.
Much the same turns out to be the case when we turn to the creation of new agencies. Agencies solve problems by giving a new policy an organisational focus. The fact that there is such disagreement even over how many there are is indicative of the relative ease with which we have been setting up new ones over the last 20 years, which in turn poses challenges for what we think about the work of departments.
It may help the debate if we can at least identify exactly how many agencies there are. Some counts (including the OECD, and recent reports by Tasc, the policy think-tank that seeks to promote social change, and the Institute of Public Administration) include local-level bodies as well as national agencies in their enumeration.
Tasc found 482 agencies, the IPA counted 601, the OECD over 800.
As the OECD report noted, the fact that so many local or regional agencies are involved in service delivery and co-ordination reflects the weakness of local government in Ireland. Even so, the definition of a public sector organisation, whether at local or national level, is itself contested.
Any of a number of criteria may be used such as to whether or not the employees are civil servants, who owns the agency, or how it is funded. Each will produce a different total number.
It is possible to categorise State agencies by multiple features including ownership and legal form, function, funding, source of authority, and form of accountability, giving a comprehensive grid on which to analyse the evolution of State agencies over time**. The UCD Mapping the Irish State project identifies 365 national-level State agencies on this basis for 2007.
But are there too many? There has certainly been a sharp upswing in the rate of agency creation - 98 of them were set up in the 1990s and 112 during the 2000s. They display a wide range of legal forms: some have been set up as departmental agencies (such as Culture Ireland, and the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service), others as statutory corporations (the Health Service Executive; the Equality Authority; TG4), companies limited by guarantee (Pobal, formerly ADM; the Irish Takeover Panel; the Institute of Public Health), or yet other legal and organisational forms.
Analysing them according to their functions, we note that some of the increase has come about through the creation of new regulatory bodies, such as the Competition Authority, the National Consumer Agency, and commissions to regulate aviation, taxis, communications, and other activities. Thirty seven of these have been set up since 1990, compared with 22 in existence until then.
There has been a significant growth in the number of adjudicatory bodies - 14 of the 26 currently in existence were set up during the 2000s - to manage complaints against statutory authorities, or to handle applications for compensation in various areas.
Of the 38 developmental agencies in existence, 26 were set up since 1990, including a restructuring of the old harbour authorities and of the industrial development agencies. There has been a marked increase in agencies engaged in advice, consultation, representation and advocacy, where 40 of the 56 bodies currently in existence have been set up since 1990. The largest single category is "delivery", where 75 of the total of 143 agencies were established since 1990 (some of them reorganising older bodies).
Our findings lend substance to the comment by the OECD that it is timely to review how and why agencies are set up and to set out strict criteria for establishing new agencies. Creating new agencies involves a whole array of additional expenditure on administration and human resource management, as well as on appointments to boards whose functions are often unclear. It raises questions about how best to make them democratically accountable, if there is no direct answerability to a Minister who can answer Dáil questions about their activities.
It may therefore be appropriate to consider whether some of the existing independent agencies might be reincorporated inside line departments as departmental agencies, with operational autonomy but within a more tightly managed policy framework - "de-agencification" has been a feature of recent public service reforms in the Netherlands and New Zealand, for example.
But the challenge is to think beyond just a tidying-up operation, or an exercise in cost-cutting where unnecessary spending is thought to arise, laudable though these aims may be. The issue of agency reform is connected to the question of junior ministers. We need to think again about what it is we want to achieve in a whole range of policy areas, and consider what makes it difficult to get more co-ordination - both vertically, between departments and agencies, and laterally, across departments.
Ireland has developed a distinctive set of responses to new policy challenges over the last two decades, through diversifying the bodies through which policy is implemented, and then increasing the number of political networkers to pull them all together.
The OECD report offers a chance to extend our focus from a proper concern with resource inputs and allocation, to reflect more systematically on mobilising resources to achieve the outcomes we want.
* Mapping the Irish State, funded by the IRCHSS, available at http://geary.ucd.ie/mapping
** Prof Colin Scott,Understanding Variety in State Agencies, UCD Geary, Working Paper , available at http://geary.ucd.ie/images/Publications/WorkingPapers/gearywp200804.pdf
Dr Niamh Hardiman is a member of the politics department in UCD and is director of the governance research programme at the Geary Institute