: Neil Collins, Terry Cradden
: Modernising Irish Government The Politics of Administrative Reform
: Gill Books
: 9780717155323
: 1
: CHF 18.00
:
: Politikwissenschaft
: English
: 226
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Modernising Irish Government presents the major historical turning points in the development of Irish public services with a particular focus on the civil service, covering the mid-nineteenth-century reforms, the foundations of the State and the Lemass-Whittaker economic initiative. It introduces the Strategic Management Initiative, its origins and its impact, discussed in terms of efficiency, responsibility and democracy. Authors Neil Collins, Terry Cradden and Patrick Butler examine the current, key issues within the Civil Service, including the contentious issue of decentralisation. Providing reviews of the institutional framework for regulating monopolies in such sectors as telecommunications, aviation and retail competition, they present a critique of the new kinds of relationships between government and the people by reviewing Social Partnership, the Citizen Charters of government departments and other similar instruments. This textbook at once examines the scale, scope and structure of the delivery of services to the public and their relationship to the civil service, government departments, commercial semi-state companies and other public bodies, while identifying a number of significant failures in service delivery in detail and offering an analysis for their reasons.

Neil Collins is Dean of Faculty and Professor of Government at University College Cork.

1

Introduction: the basics of Irish government

Neil Collins& Terry Cradden

The politics of administrative reform in Ireland1 is an important and timely subject as the Republic continues its major economic and social transformation in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The primary focus of this book is the civil and public service—a dimension of the Irish political landscape that has not been emphasised sufficiently in the literature for several years because political scientists and interested others have concentrated on political parties, elections, corruption, the conflict in Northern Ireland and, more recently, the reform of parliament.

The pace of reform in recent years has been a critical impetus; while the essential understanding of government institutions and process has been well set out in several texts—most notably Dooney and O’Toole (1998)—the need for a volume encompassing these recent changes has been clear for some time. It is also apparent that much factual and statistical information, which has formed the bedrock of previous studies, has become available via the internet,2 so a more interpretive, discursive and analytical approach to the subject can now be attempted, without the need to rehearse many of the detailed descriptions of Irish institutions which previous accounts found to be necessary and provided so carefully. Nonetheless it is important to cover some of the same basics as others have done, especially as regards the institutional background of Irish government. This is what we shall do here, in as succinct a manner as possible.

THE WESTMINSTER MODEL

The political institutions of the Republic are, for the most part, based on the ‘Westminster model’. Each of the institutions referred to in Bunreacht na hÉireann (the Irish Constitution)—the Presidency, the Oireachtas (parliament), the Cabinet and the Courts—is given specific powers, to be exercised in accordance with the general principles of a British-style parliamentary democracy.

Perhaps the key characteristic of the Westminster model is the fusion of the legislature and the executive—in other words, the executive arm of government is drawn from among elected members of parliament. Critics of the model argue that this means there are inadequate checks on the power of the government and, in particular, on the power of the prime minister (Taoiseach). Advocates, on the other hand, claim that the close relationship between members of parliament and the government is, in fact, an advantage because it makes for efficiency in decision-making and the government can act swiftly, when necessary, without being blocked by other state institutional powers and without the need for cumbersome compromise. As against the claim of e