Public sector reform in ireland countering crisis (executive politics and governance)

Together we mapped a way forward: he opened the door to Irish government buildings and I undertook to document and analyse how his Department sought to control the state’s public spendin

EXECUTIVE POLITICS AND GOVERNANCE

ment, its organisation and its instruments It is particularly concerned with how the changing conditions of contemporary governing affect per-ennial questions in political science and public administration Executive Politics and Governance is therefore centrally interested in questions such as how politics interacts with bureaucracies, how issues rise and fall on political agendas, and how public organisations and services are designed and operated This book series encourages a closer engagement with the role of politics in shaping executive structures, and how admin-istration shapes politics and policy-making In addition, this series also wishes to engage with the scholarship that focuses on the organisational aspects of politics, such as government formation and legislative institu-tions The series welcomes high quality research-led monographs with comparative appeal Edited volumes that provide in-depth analysis and critical insights into the field of Executive Politics and Governance are also encouraged.

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Kutsal Yesilkagit, University of Utrecht, the Netherlands

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Muiris MacCarthaigh

Public Sector Reform

in Ireland Countering Crisis

School of History, Anthropology,

Philosophy and Politics

Queen’s University Belfast

Belfast, UK

Executive Politics and Governance

ISBN 978-3-319-57459-2 ISBN 978-3-319-57460-8 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57460-8

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to improve the efficiency of the public service was not as clearly seen as a

priority as it is now.

Ireland is clearly entering a period of prolonged fiscal restraint In this environment, major public service reforms are essential to help facilitate adjustment in public administration and minimise service reductions to the

public.

—Wright, R (2010) Strengthening the Capacity of the Department

of Finance (Report of the Independent Review Panel)

(Dublin: Department of Finance)

On the Irish side, the counterparts at both the technocratic and political level were uniformly superb They were knowledgeable, dedicated, smart, funny and committed to tackling Ireland’s difficult situation There are too many individuals for me to mention by name and it’s invidious to single out just a few so I won’t do so These Irish public servants were true heroes

in how they dealt with the crisis in Ireland and Europe The nation should

be proud of them and they should be proud of what they achieved under

Acknowledgements

The origins of this book can be traced to a series of conversations with Robert Watt following his appointment as Secretary-General at the new Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (DPER) in 2011 My interest in the ambitious reform agenda of the freshly elected govern-ment was matched by his desire to capture the experience and lessons

of reform, warts and all Together we mapped a way forward: he opened the door to Irish government buildings and I undertook to document and analyse how his Department sought to control the state’s public spending after a deep and existential economic crisis, whilst also pursuing the most ambitious public sector reform agenda in Ireland’s history.The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform and Queen’s University Belfast subsequently agreed to co-sponsor a 2-year Public Service Reform Research Fellowship which allowed me to undertake the fieldwork for this book This work was undertaken primarily over the 2013–2015 period, though data gathering continued right up to the general election of February 2016 This insider access to an Irish gov-ernment department in action is unprecedented and during the field research I developed good working relations with the many public serv-ants who, though unlikely ever to be household names, worked tirelessly and made tough decisions that played no small part in the state’s very survival

And so my first thank you here must be a broad one and is extended

to the full staff complement of DPER for being so receptive to the

project I am particularly grateful to members of the Department’s Management Board for extending their trust at a time of extraordinary challenge and uncertainty, and for always having an open door policy when I came knocking I must thank in particular Dermot Nolan and, following his appointment as Irish ambassador to the OECD, his suc-cessor David Feeney for acting as my contact point and for consistently making helpful suggestions as to where I might find relevant informa-tion and how I might best make sense of ‘village life’ in the civil service For obvious reasons, interviewees were afforded anonymity—only where individuals were identified in the public record, or were happy to be pub-licly associated with particular quotations in this study, are they named

I am deeply grateful to each individual who gave freely of their time and insights

Minister Brendan Howlin was also generous with his time, and owing him brought a new appreciation of the considerable skill needed

shad-by Irish Cabinet Ministers to juggle ministerial, party, departmental and constituency responsibilities My thanks also to Michelle O’Connor in the Minister’s private office for arranging my ‘fly on the wall’ attendance

at a number of events and forums and explaining the finer details of how Cabinet functions

Particular thanks must be extended to Rónán O’Brien, whose est in Irish administrative and political history played no small role in the project’s gestation, and smoothed the way to interviews with some key informants Sincere appreciation also to Patricia Scanlon in the Secretary-General’s office for her unfailing assistance and advice with my many queries and requests

inter-This project benefitted greatly from an Academic Advisory Committee:

I am indebted to Professor Niamh Hardiman (University College Dublin), Professor Colin Scott (University College Dublin), Professor Edoardo Ongaro (Open University), Professor Koen Verhoest (University

of Antwerp) and Professor Matthew Flinders (University of Sheffield) Thanks also to those who took part in a number of academic–practi-tioner roundtables and workshops in Dublin over the period of the study, including Dr Thomas Elston (University of Oxford), Dr Kate Dommett (University of Sheffield) and members of the Academic Advisory Committee

I am grateful to my (then) Head of School Professor David Phinnemore for recognising the merit of the project from its inception,

and being consistently supportive as it developed, including facilitating the necessary research leave.

My huge gratitude, as ever, to my wife Anna who tolerated my research trips to Dublin over several years, managed our small children and the demands of her own career, and still found time to comment on successive drafts

Finally, I would like to sincerely thank Robert Watt for opening the door of his Department to academic scrutiny, and for facilitating my requests throughout I hope this work goes some way towards realis-ing his ambition for more informed and probing analysis of Irish public administration

Any errors and omissions are the responsibility of the author

contents

Bibliography 275

list of figures

Fig 2.1 OECD representation of Irish politico-administration

Fig 2.2 Main Irish political parties 1922–2011, by percentage

of first preference votes at elections 29 Fig 2.3 Agencies in Ireland 1922–2008 (per year) and key

Fig 5.2 Agency rationalisation in Ireland, 2008–2013 148 Fig 6.1 The age profile of the Irish civil service 191 Fig 7.1 Deviation of Actual and Gross Current Expenditure

from Budget Projections 2001–2006 197 Fig 7.2 Net expenditure by Irish governments, 2001–2015 198 Fig 7.3 Irish government revenues by type, 2006–2015 208 Fig 7.4 General Government Balance (% GDP), 2007–2016 209

list of tAbles

Table 2.1 The parties in power 1922–2016

(Fianna Fáil-led governments in grey) 30 Table 2.2 State development and organisational change

Table 3.1 Arrangement of central government functions

in Westminster/Whitehall States 88 Table 5.1 Phases of the Irish cutback management approach 134 Table 6.1 Effect of pay reductions 2008–2014 on salary scales 184 Table 6.2 The changing character of the Irish Public Service Bargain 190 Table 7.1 Summary of actual and planned austerity measures,

Table 10.1 Cutback measures adopted in Ireland 268

The global financial crisis (GFC) beginning in late 2007 ushered in a period of sustained state retrenchment ‘Austerity’ budgets and expendi-ture cutbacks became increasingly common as the worst affected states wrestled with the twin challenges of fiscal imbalance and creeping pub-lic debt The precise nature of the policy measures and tactics adopted

by governments to counter the effects of the GFC varied significantly (cf Bideleux 2011; Kickert 2012; Peters et al 2011; OECD 2012; Kickert and Randma-Liiv 2015), but a common feature of the response formula was the initiation of a new era of public sector reforms (OECD

2010) The fallout from the GFC is such that these reform measures are destined to continue for some time (Pollitt 2010a, 2010b; Peters 2011; Thynne 2011; Coen and Roberts 2012; Lodge and Hood 2012)

The primary focus of existing scholarly analysis of these public tor reform efforts has been to compare and contrast state responses to the GFC (Kickert and Randma-Liiv 2015; Hammerschmid et al 2016) There are, however, few studies that provide a ‘thick’ description of how individual states introduced and managed their cutback strategies This study addresses this shortcoming by presenting a detailed analysis of public sector reforms undertaken in a state that is well documented as having been one of those most badly affected by the GFC Furthermore,

sec-it examines these administrative reform efforts from the perspective of those charged with their development and implementation, and who largely operated ‘under the radar’ of daily political life

Introduction

© The Author(s) 2017

M MacCarthaigh, Public Sector Reform in Ireland, Executive

Politics and Governance, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57460-8_1

The Irish banking crisis was described by the International Monetary Fund as ‘the costliest banking crisis in advanced economies since at least the Great Depression’ (Laeven and Valencia 2012, p 21) Global con-ditions notwithstanding, a number of official reports into the causes of the Irish crisis (Regling and Watson 2010; Honohan 2010; Independent Review Panel 2011, Houses of the Oireachtas 2016) have pointed to

a combination of domestic contributing factors These include weak regulation of financial institutions, weak state capacity and pro-cycli-cal fiscal policies adopted by successive Irish governments from the late 1990s This toxic mix resulted in one of the world’s largest ever state bank guarantees and a subsequent ‘bailout’ loan from the Troika of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), European Commission (EC) and European Central Bank (ECB) in late 2010

Also as a consequence of the banking crisis, the 2008–2016 period was defined by an unprecedented series of cutbacks and reform measures within the Irish public service The focus of analysis for this volume is the role played in these measures by a new Irish Government Department (or Ministry)—the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (DPER)—created by a freshly elected administration in early 2011 Using insider access provided over a 2-year period which concluded with the general election of February 2016, it provides a detailed and the-

matic analysis of the reforms pursued by political and administrative

fig-ures in the midst of the crisis

AcAdemic context

This work speaks to a number of literatures In the first instance, it

engages recent scholarship on executive politics in times of crisis (Lodge

and Wegrich 2012) This literature reflects the fact that large-scale lic management reforms and administrative reorganisations have increas-ingly become an object of political interest (Barzelay 2001; Christensen and Laegreid 2007; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011) Shrinking the state, in particular, has found considerable favour internationally amongst cen-tre-right and neo-liberal parties in the context of the GFC And across Europe, comparative studies of the choices made by political executives under fiscal stress (Kickert and Randma-Liiv 2015; Kickert et al 2015), and the perspectives of top public servants about the nature and effects

pub-of these reforms (Hammerschmid et al 2016) have identified a variety of responses to the crisis

This study contributes to this literature by examining the tion of a set of wide-ranging politically mandated public sector reforms which arose in the context of a severe, if not existential, crisis in one EU member state The Irish reform effort from 2011 sought to overhaul an administrative system that has traditionally been considered a ‘laggard’

implementa-in public service reform efforts, and particularly when compared with its Westminster/Whitehall counterparts Indeed, the comparative absence

of substantial reform prior to the crisis has contributed to the Irish case not featuring prominently in mainstream research on executive politics in times of crisis or otherwise

The successful implementation of many of these reforms has received considerable interest and praise from international organisations such as the OECD and World Bank, but has not been the subject of comprehen-sive academic inquiry That many of the early reform efforts were under-taken in the context of a Troika loan programme is also an important feature of the Irish case For a state not considered to be in the vanguard

of public service reforms, and which is distinctive by its relatively low degree of ideological differentiation, the reform effort over the 2011–

2016 period thus merits the attention of scholars of executive politics.This work therefore seeks to contribute to the international field by thematically presenting and examining the reforms undertaken by the Irish public administration, and locating them in both historical context and a frame of executive politics Where possible, the project places the Irish reform efforts in comparative relief, drawing on existing literature

on crisis-inspired cutback management to present the contribution of the Irish case It also presents this from the perspective of those bureaucrats

on the ‘front line’ of effecting change during a time of crisis

Secondly, this volume provides a novel perspective on the issue of

cut-back management in a time of particular and deep crisis It is well

docu-mented that significant public service reforms have occurred in times of austerity-induced cutbacks, rather than times of plenty The ‘New Public Management’ (NPM) revolution that swept across the globe in various guises followed successive oil crises in the mid- and late 1970s (Hood

1991), and specifically cuts arising from a currency crisis in the ing’ New Zealand case of NPM reform (cf Boston 1987; Aberbach and Christensen 2001) The much-vaunted British National Health Service (NHS) was created post-WWII at a time of huge public debt as well as cuts to public spending and employment, but has survived to become an iconic public service organisation internationally

‘trailblaz-In economic policy, where the lessons from previous fiscal tion efforts in the 1980s proved influential post 2008 (cf Alesina and Perotti 1995, Reinhart and Rogoff 2010), there were some lessons in cutback management available to governments from previous fiscal cor-rections1 In respect of widespread or ‘whole-of-government’ reform in a time of crisis, however, successful templates to follow were hard to find Academic interest in the issue of cutback management has reawakened in recent years as governments have sought to rapidly rein in public spend-ing, with scholars drawing on and reconsidering lessons from a previous generation of literature (Bozeman 2010; Raudla et al 2015) Surveying this literature in the late 1980s, Dunsire and Hood noted that,

consolida-A great deal of academic thought has been given to explaining the

prob-lem of government growth, but there has been no comparable attention to

explaining how the difficulties of cutting back government might best be approached…until the last ten years or so ( 1989 , p 1)

Levine’s (1978, 1979) early work which sought to theorise cutback agement by looking at internal and external political and economic causes

man-of organisational decline, and effects on employee well-being, is quently identified as leading the charge Later work by Levine and others examined the effects of across-the-board cuts or ‘decrementalism’ (Levine

fre-1985), contemporaneously referred to as ‘sharing the pain’ (Biller 1980),

‘cheese-slicing’ (Tarschys 1981) or the ‘equal misery approach’ (Hood and Wright 1981) The across-the-board approach, which tended to involve small cuts (Wright 1981), was contrasted with the effects of more selective or targeted cutback approaches (Schick 1983; Behn 1980), which cut deeper Other prominent themes from this body of work included how governments chose to vary cuts between operational costs (and within this personnel and non-personnel costs), programme costs (including transfers and entitlements) and capital expenditure and invest-ments (Raudla et al 2015, p 442) There also tend to be ‘rounds’ of cutback management as one-off actions tend not to deliver the necessary results, usually because governments seek to minimise negative political fallout by imposing the minimum of cuts where possible

While cutback studies declined during the subsequent years of plenty, a new generation of scholarship has recently emerged concerned with how governments and public administrations have responded to the ‘Great Recession’ Some work is cross-national in nature (cf Bideleux 2011;

Peters 2011; Peters et al 2011; Kickert 2012; Coen and Roberts 2012), while other work adopts a longitudinal approach (Hood et al 2014) and others still have considered specific elements of these responses includ-ing the issue of fiscal contraction (Dougherty and Klas 2009; Cepiku and Savignon 2012) and the changing nature of the relationship between pol-iticians and public servants (Lodge and Hood 2012; Bach 2012).

In their review of literature on the dynamics of decision-making ing cutback management, Savi and Randma-Liiv (2015) distil two tra-jectories of action One calls for greater centralisation and assertion of top-down controls, as it provides the most efficient means to achieve spending cuts that will not materialise voluntarily (e.g Behn 1980; Bozeman 2010) An opposing view (Massey 2011; Pollitt 2010a) holds that decentralisation offers a more successful cutback management strat-egy as it facilitates swifter and less damaging cutbacks by providing flex-ibility and using local knowledge

dur-As with reform paradigms (above), pure cutback management models adopting one of the above strategies alone are difficult to find In prac-tice, there are ‘as many responses as countries’ (Peters 2011, p 76), with governments adopting a variety of strategies either in tandem, or switch-ing between modes in response to changing circumstances For example, Levine (1979) noted that in contexts where retrenchment lasts long and cuts are severe, it is more likely that a centralised approach will replace

a decentralised one, where it exists A similar ‘staged’ pattern evolving from cheese-slicing to more targeted cuts was recorded more recently in

a survey of European states by Kickert et al (2015), with the evolution occurring at different speeds according to the severity of the crisis

Thirdly, by presenting a case study of a national reform agenda in a period of austerity, the book also contributes to the extant literature on

trajectories of public sector reform Public sector reform is commonly

por-trayed as a linear or rational process, culminating in some form of desired end point In reality, it is a more tangled affair with old solutions being constantly re-discovered and adapted to new circumstances, invariably leading to new challenges and unintended consequences Reform ‘waves’ can however be discerned over time, in which ideas about greater or looser central control, more or less market engagement and more uni-form or tailored organisational arrangements are interchanged

As Van de Walle et al (2016, pp 2–3) identify, though no individual state has consciously followed them in their reform efforts, three major public administration reform paradigms can be distilled from this literature:

• a Weberian-inspired reform paradigm which seeks to transform rimonial systems into modern rule-bound bureaucracies;

pat-• the New Public Management (NPM) paradigm, which seeks to infuse state administrations with market-type mechanisms and busi-ness management logics including organisational disaggregation and performance measurement; and

• a combination of the above, variously referred to as rianism (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011), New Public Governance (Osborne 2006) or, more commonly, a post-NPM paradigm (Christensen and Laegreid 2007) in which Weberian ideas around impartiality, neutrality and standardisation of work practices are mar-ried with the marketisation- and performance-based ideas of NPM.Underpinning the demand for post-NPM reforms are concerns about addressing the institutional fragmentation of public service organisa-tions and specialisation on policy processes which are deemed an adverse outcome of NPM-inspired disaggregation and decentralisation Thus, post-NPM is associated with (re)centralisation of control (political and administrative), as well as a greater focus on coordination, collabora-tion and joined-up outcomes (cf Chapman and Duncan 2007; Jun

neo-Webe-2009; Goldfinch and Wallis 2010; Lodge and Gill 2011; De Vries and Nemec 2013) A post-NPM paradigm also helps us make sense of the trend towards whole-of-government or ‘joined-up government’ reform programmes internationally (Christensen and Laegreid 2011) Such pro-grammes typically seek to combine aspects of hierarchical (or vertical) control with cross-government (or horizontal) approaches to reform As will be detailed below, the post-NPM paradigm does speak readily to the Irish reform agenda from 2011 which was designed to be, in effect, a

‘whole-of-government’ initiative, reaching across all aspects of the ico-administrative system in response to widespread public criticism of it arising from the economic crisis

polit-Fourthly, and finally, the book makes a contribution to scholarship

on Irish government and politics The impulse towards managerialism in

the public sector has strong US influences (Osborne and Gaebler 1992), but NPM reforms are primarily associated with what are termed the Anglophone or Anglo-Saxon states (cf Halligan 2015), particularly the

UK, New Zealand, Australia and Canada And although it shares many basic institutional features with them, scholars of public administration have tended not to stray from the well-worn path between these states

to examine the Irish case of public sector reform, which has its own tinctive characteristics In large part, this can be attributed to the relative absence of data and academic work on the Irish administrative system, itself a product of the limited number of scholars working in the field.Government is often portrayed as a centrally coordinated and pur-posive actor—the rational actor model—rather than the conglomerate

dis-of political and administrative actors with competing (and occasionally common) interests revealed on closer inspection By adopting a case study approach to public sector reform, this book offers an Irish perspec-tive into what Heclo and Wildavsky (1974) famously termed in their pio-neering study of Whitehall as ‘village life’ In particular, the study offers insight concerning the application of reform ideas into practice, the bar-riers and enablers of success, and the political rationales and pressures contributing to the choice of reform efforts in an Irish context

Within Irish political and social sciences, until recently the cracy was arguably the least well-explored element of the governing sys-tem, giving rise to a relatively small pool of scholarship on the public service, public sector reform and executive politics Basil Chubb’s various

bureau-editions of the Government and Politics of Ireland (1970/1982/1992) provided some analysis of the Irish administrative system and cul-ture, and its relationship to the political institutions of state, but it was

only with Barrington’s The Irish Administrative System (1980) that a more systematic and theoretical approach was adopted to the bureau-

cracy Dooney’s short work on The Irish Civil Service (1976) also vided a detailed but atheoretical examination of the service, and the

pro-three editions of Dooney and O’Toole’s Irish Government Today

(1992/1998/2009) offer useful, if predominantly descriptive, analysis of Irish public administration However, the most recent edition does not address the considerable reforms and institutional developments in Irish

government since 2008 Similarly, the edited book Modernising Irish

Government (2007) by Collins, Cradden and Butler and MacCarthaigh’s

short Government in Modern Ireland (2008) were published just prior to the onset of the financial and economic crisis

The main academic textbooks on Irish politics do not seek to explore

in any substantive way the Irish bureaucratic system Coakley and

Gallagher’s Politics in the Republic of Ireland (5th edition, 2010) does not address the system of public administration to any great degree

Similarly, Adshead and Tonge’s Politics in Ireland (2009) contains a gle overview chapter on the bureaucracy in the Republic of Ireland and

sin-Northern Ireland The contributors to Adshead and Millar’s Public

Administration and Public Policy in Ireland (2003) do apply some nent theories in the field of public administration to specific policy sectors, but there are no common narratives emerging and there is relatively little exploration of the topic of administrative reform In contrast, the study

promi-of administration at Irish local government level has been well served by Roche (1987) and Callanan and Keogan (2003)

The dearth of literature on the Irish administrative system and its work is matched by the lack of academic studies of Government Departments, an issue which this book also seeks to address In fact, only three detailed studies of Irish government Departments can be found, all historical and all published by the Institute of Public Administration:

Ronan Fanning’s seminal work The Irish Department of Finance, 1922–

Historical Roots of the Department of the Environment (1997 ) and The

First Department: A history of the Department of Agriculture (2002)

Charles Murray’s The Irish Civil Service Observed (1990) also provides a set of notable ‘insider’ reflections of the departmental civil service over a number of decades prior to 1990 A popular insider account by a former diplomat also gave some insights into the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs (Delaney 2001) The absence of any serious academic engage-ment on the work of the Department of the Public Service (1973–1987), with which the Department in this study has been compared, was

a missed opportunity for the study of public administration and ment in Ireland The lessons and effects of fiscal retrenchment during the mid-1980s were also poorly documented Thus, it has remained the case that the Irish administrative system is significantly under-researched

manage-in comparative terms, which has manage-inhibited both popular understandmanage-ing about the role and work of the public service, as well as political debate about its future

There are some exceptions to this general absence of work on Irish bureaucracy One of the most well-developed fields within Irish pub-lic administration in recent years concerns the study of state agencies Original work by McGauran et al (2005) has been augmented by work

emanating from the Irish State Administration Database (www.isad.ie) project (Hardiman et al 2016) Launched in 2010, it virtually maps the evolution of state structures from Irish independence in 1922, providing information on the life cycle of all public organisations since then It has also stimulated new insights into the role of the Irish state (Hardiman and

MacCarthaigh 2010; Hardiman and Scott 2010; MacCarthaigh 2010,

2015) work on the role of political or ‘special’ advisers has been essential reading for contemporary analysis of political–administrative relations in Ireland MacCormaic’s (2016) recent work on the concept of politicisa-tion in Irish politico-administrative relationships is also illuminating

In respect of the Irish crisis specifically, the chapters in Hardiman’s (2012) edited Irish Governance in Crisis provide an insightful critique

of numerous public policy arenas The editor’s introductory chapter points firmly to weaknesses in Irish state capacity arising from over-cen-tralisation, the inability of the state to sufficiently aggregate interests and distance itself from particularised interests, and absence of values pro-moting formalised accountability The edited textbook on Irish central government by O’Malley and MacCarthaigh (2012) also identifies the shortcomings of a governing system that has been proved resistant to sustained reform

With the exception of some recent work by MacCarthaigh (2014a,

has been published on the recent Irish case of administrative ment in spite of it representing one of the most dramatic examples of its kind in Europe Some data has also emerged from an EU-wide survey of public sector leaders (Boyle 2016b, see also IPA 2014), which provides a snapshot of how Irish public sector managers considered reform efforts then underway The survey found that the majority of participants felt that the quality of public administration in Ireland has improved since the crisis began, including better performance in terms of cost and effi-ciency, service quality, innovation and external transparency and open-ness Other findings pointed to majority perceptions of reform efforts

retrench-as being primarily a top-down, cost-cutting exercise (IPA 2014, p 40) And while the edited collection by Roche et al (2017) provides an excel-lent range of perspectives on the Irish experience of economic austerity and recovery, including political and administrative reforms, earlier works focusing on the economic crisis (Ó Riain 2014; Donovan and Murphy

2013) do not offer analysis of the administrative state outside critiques of public sector pay-setting mechanisms

Some popular works have emerged about the coalition that assumed office in 2011 by, respectively, a political journalist (Leahy 2013), a for-mer special advisor to a Minister (Walshe 2014) and the former Tánaiste (deputy-PM) who held office for the first three of the government’s

5-year term (Gilmore 2015) All provide valuable accounts of some key events and challenges faced by the government as it sought to address a series of economic and other crises In all cases, the creation and work

of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform are pointed to as seminal achievements of the administration

Theoretical Influences

As well as contributing to the public administration literature, several chapters in this study draw upon theories from public policy and politi-cal science which seek to explain policy inertia and also major policy

changes Within public policy scholarship, there has been a growing

range of frameworks and theories for understanding the dynamics of policy change (Cairney 2012; Knill and Tosun 2012; John 2012; Dodds

2013) One of the most enduring is Kingdon’s (1984/1995) ‘multiple streams’ framework—refined by Herweg et al (2015) to emphasise the policy role of political parties—and which features here Premised on the notion that certain ideas or forms of knowledge inform and shape the decisions of political and administrative actors, and crowd out others, Kingdon proposed that change only occurs when there is a confluence

of ‘streams’ within the ‘policy primeval soup’ (1995, p 117)—problem streams, policy streams and political streams—which when aligned pre-sents a ‘window of opportunity’ for reform Such windows are exploited

by ‘policy entrepreneurs’, a term also coined by Kingdon to describe actors who use their knowledge of the process to further their own pol-icy ends.2 These may be politicians, bureaucrats, interest group leaders or persons in positions of authority with the ability to identify windows of opportunity for change, and the capacity to frame the problem in a man-ner that requires their solution, or at least allows them to try out ideas and make them fit as best they can

For such a window of opportunity to result in change may require the existence of an ‘advocacy coalition’, or group of policy entrepreneurs (such as senior politicians, top officials and political advisers) who share common beliefs or problem perceptions Based on the work of Sabatier (1988) and Sabatier and Weible (2007), an advocacy coalition frame-work posits that groups of ‘policy participants’ hold strong and common values and beliefs which they seek to turn into actual policy before their opponents do so The focus is long-term rather than short-term, and

as well as holding ‘deep-core’ beliefs around such issues as democratic values or political ideology, policy participants will also have ‘near-core’ beliefs around such issues as power distribution within and across gov-ernment, the causes of prominent policy problems and the role of the state in solving them.

An alternative analytical model from public policy scholarship to help explain change in a time of crisis emerges from Baumgartner and Jones’ (1993) ‘punctuated equilibrium’ frame Drawing on ideas from evolu-tionary biology, they propose that systems of government experience long periods of stability (or equilibrium), but on occasion crisis does occur, resulting in fundamental change Baumgartner and Jones identi-fied a number of factors to explain policy stasis, namely the ‘stickiness’

of political institutions (arising from the interests of those in power to maintain the status quo and related cultural norms, and to resolve policy conflicts within existing networks), and the cognitive limitations faced by decision-makers when making choices, or what Simon (1957) had earlier referred to as ‘bounded rationality’

From political science, institutional theory has championed the role

played by formal institutions (parliaments, laws, etc.) in constraining and enabling political choices However, a growing interest in the dynamic rather than ‘frozen’ nature of institutions (as well as the role played by informal social or ‘anthropological’ institutions such as conventions or cultures) has resulted in what has been termed the neo-institutional revival There are a number of well-documented variants of institutional theory, including rational choice, sociological and historical institutional-ism (Hall and Taylor 1996), with others appearing more recently such

as constructivist (Hay 2006) and discursive institutionalism (Schmidt

Of particular interest here is the historical variant of institutional ory, whose advocates seek to ‘bring history back in’ to the analysis of political and policy process evolution (cf Krasner 1988; Pierson 2004; Streek and Thelen 2005, Pollitt 2008) Historical institutionalism places particular emphasis on the concept of ‘path dependency’, described as when ‘each step along a particular path produces consequences which make that path more attractive’ (Pierson 2000, p 253) In other words, increasing returns and positive feedback sustain and reinforce institu-tional trajectories The cost of exiting these self-reinforcing mechanisms increases over time and can result in inefficiencies building up as the capacity to adopt better alternatives diminishes

the-For scholars of public administration, these are important concepts for explaining resistance to reform, and the incidence of ‘punctuated equi-librium’, whereby radical changes occur that fundamentally change pol-icy narratives and overcome the embeddedness of existing institutional arrangements (March and Olsen 1989) Where sudden changes to exist-ing institutional pathways occur, they have been described as occurring

at ‘critical junctures’ (Capoccia 2015) Critical junctures may arise from exogenous shocks such as crises, and present alternative trajectories for action that are not normally available Decisions taken at critical junctures will in turn shape a new ‘path’ which constrains future policy options These theoretical contributions help explain how best we might under-stand the role and authority of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, and its significance for Irish public administration

Notwithstanding concerns over its limitations as a means for esis and theory testing (King et al 1994, p 211), adopting a single-case study approach (including process tracing) does offer insights and

hypoth-a method of lehypoth-arning thhypoth-at lhypoth-arge N comphypoth-arhypoth-ative studies mhypoth-ay not offer (Flyvberg 2006) In the case of the application of public sector reform ideas into practice, these insights include better visibility of the barriers and enablers of success, the political rationales and pressure points, and the less obvious factors contributing to the choice of reform measures and strategies adopted In fact, although memoirs from former political and administrative elites are increasingly common, there are compara-tively few academic ‘insider’ accounts of government reform in action and those that exist are focused on Whitehall

Apart from the aforementioned study of public finance management

by Heclo and Wildavsky (1974), more recent work includes Hood et al’s (1999) study of regulation inside British government, and Flinders’ (2008) study of the consequences of agency delegation in Britain The fascinating study Thain and Wright (1995) by of the British Treasury over the 1976–1993 period was also based on a period of research within that organisation One notable exception to this British focus is provided from Canada in the form of Lindquist’s (1996) chapter titled ‘On the Cutting Edge: Program Review, Government Restructuring, and the

Treasury Board of Canada’ in Gene Swimmer’s edited work How Ottawa

Spends 1996–1997: Life Under the Knife.

As a study also focused on the ‘inside’ story of government, this

monograph is particularly inspired by Rhodes’ Everyday Life in British

Developed and used by Rhodes in this and earlier work (Bevir and Rhodes 2006), the interpretative approach emphasises the agency of individuals to create, and act on, meanings They propose that a Minister

or senior official’s theories about how they should act in office may differ from ours To understand them we cannot simply read them from objec-tive social facts about the individuals in question, but must relate them

to other beliefs, traditions and dilemmas In short they advocate a ‘thick’ description of how government operates, and emphasise the importance

of interpreting ‘governance’ by examining practices from the bottom

up To achieve this, during 2003–2004, Rhodes observed the offices of two British Ministers and three permanent secretaries for 2 days each, and shadowed two ministers and three permanent secretaries for 5 days each He also conducted interviews with Ministers, secretaries of state, permanent secretaries and other officials (2011, p 8) Adopting this eth-nographic approach, he sought to compare what he saw with three con-ventional narratives of British government:

• a Westminster or constitutional story emphasising hierarchy and strong executive;

• a public management story which emphasises managerial, market and delivery reforms of last 20 years; and

• a governance story which looks at horizontal and vertical networks

in which core executive and departments are embedded

In addressing these themes, he concluded that greater appreciation was needed of the ‘court’ system, i.e the complexities, norms and pressures that operate inside British Departments

In contrast with Rhodes, this study concerns a single, and new, Department at the centre of Irish government created in a moment of severe crisis, which sought to introduce an unprecedented range of cross-government rather than sectoral-specific reforms And while there are many parallels between the Irish and British administrative systems, there are important differences also and a less developed literature against which to test ideas in an Irish context

The primary material gathered for this study was collected during the period of a Research Fellowship on Public Service Reform conducted

over the period of September 2013–February 2016 As well as being provided with office accommodation in the Irish Government buildings complex for the period of the study, access was provided to Management Board meetings as well as various public engagements and events hosted

by the Department A number of academic–practitioner roundtables were also organised as part of the Fellowship work Access was also pro-vided to files relating to the various reform initiatives and draft publi-cations within the Department I also spent two working days with the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, including attendance at meetings with special advisors, civil servants, visiting delegations and a number of public events

Similar to Rhodes’ approach, and with the goal of allowing key informants to express their own thoughts in their own words (Leonard

2003), the primary source of information was the use of semi-structured interviews As Bryson and McConville (2014, p 12) identify, the princi-pal benefit of using the one-to-one interview method is its focus on indi-vidual experience Those interviewed for this project included political advisers, Secretaries-General, officials in DPER and other departments, trade union officials, as well as a number of key external informants with good understanding and historical perspective on DPER’s work As the focus was on hearing from those charged with devising and implement-ing public service reform, almost two-thirds of the interviews (38) were with middle- and senior-ranking officials within DPER, including all members of the Management Board With the exception of the politi-cal or special advisers within DPER, the remaining interviewees were external to the Department And although approaches were made to other Ministers to be interviewed, these were unsuccessful and only one Minister was interviewed

In total, 61 interviews were conducted during the period of the Fellowship, of which four were not audio-recorded, totaling 33 hours

of audio recording In all cases, indicative questions for discussion were sent in advance and a consent form signed by interviewees Interviews were conducted on a confidential basis, and in line with a commitment to protect project participants no direct quotations have been used or attributed without prior approval from the interviewee

To further protect anonymity, numbers have been allocated randomly for each interview and these appear at the end of direct or indirect quotations The interviews conducted were with the following catego-ries of informant:

• Ministers: 3 (three interviews with one Minister);

• Special Advisers: 6 (2 interviews with one Special Adviser and one interview each with 4 others);

• Secretaries-General: 10 (4 interviews with one Secretary-General and one interview each with 6 others);

• DPER officials: 35 (including 2 interviews with each of 3 officials and 29 others);

• Trade Union officials: 3;

• Officials from other Departments: 2; and

• Other external stakeholders: 2

In explaining the background to the creation of DPER, the study also draws on a further 3 interviews conducted by the author with former Secretaries-General for previous research concerning Irish public service reform efforts in the 1990s

As Wood (2007) identifies, engaging in field work that locates the researcher amongst their object of study offers sources of data not else-where available, and is often the only means of identifying key actors and core processes Spending time inside the ‘black box’ of government, particularly through a period of transformation, allows the researcher

an unparalleled perspective on the process of government as well as the chance to give a voice to groups not often represented in its study There are shortcomings to the approach also For example, Shore and Nugent (2002) point to the fact that when exploring elite cultures the research participants can control the access and exit of the researcher and may limit the type and quantity of information to be made available to them The researcher’s position may also change quickly from impartial independent observer to engaged participant, and critical distance may

be compromised The benefits of ‘insider’ access justify such ings however, and to explore why it is that policy evolves in unexpected ways and party manifesto proposals can often end up looking very differ-ent from that envisaged, or have major unintended consequences It also demonstrates the benefit of an ethnographic approach for exploring how organisations seek to turn reform ideas into action, and in the case of government to see what the contents of the ‘black box’ really are

shortcom-Finally, for the main part this study is concerned with administrative reforms from the perspective of actors at the meso- or middle level of a governing system Adopting Hood’s (2011) framework, at the macro-level lie what he describes as the ‘top bananas’, i.e the most senior

officeholders such as prime ministers and members of the political tive At the micro-level are the ‘infantry’ or ‘street-level bureaucrats’, the nurses, teachers and police whose daily workplace dilemmas and compet-ing challenges were theorised by Lipsky (1980) The actors at the meso-level examined here are the ‘meat in the sandwich’, which consists of a complex world of senior and mid-ranking managers and professionals, who have significant responsibility but are less visible to the public in the conduct of their duties than their political masters.

execu-As well as creating primary material for the project, the study draws extensively on official publications and web-based datasets pro-duced by the Department and other public organisations includ-ing the Department of Finance and the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council Parliamentary debates and speeches by the Minister, other members of the Government and the Secretary-General of the Department have also proved useful, as have a number of secondary sources including academic and non-academic publications on the Irish economic crisis, as well as on the coalition government formed in 2011

The book proceeds as follows Chapter 2 provides an overview of the Irish political and administrative systems from independence in 1922 until the eve of the Global Financial Crisis In terms of public service reform efforts, a distinction is drawn between the period from 1922 to

1990 and from 1990 until 2008 when Ireland experienced a version of New Public Management-styled reforms A final section details the con-tent of preliminary cutback efforts developed as the crisis unfolded in

2008 until the collapse of the incumbent governing administration in early 2011

Chapter 3 presents a detailed account of the critical juncture in the Irish response to the global financial crisis that was the creation of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform It follows the jour-ney from the idea conceived by a number of political parties during the early years of the crisis of a new organisational entity for reforming the Irish public sector, to the process of sculpting it out of the existing state machinery The chapter considers the political and administrative pres-sures framing the eventual shape and scope of the Department’s role, and the intense behind-the-scenes work that took place within the civil service prior to and immediately after General Election 2011 to prepare

for and then create the Department The chapter also draws attention to the key roles—expenditure control, public service reform and industrial relations—bestowed on the Department, and how these compare with equivalent institutional arrangements elsewhere.

Chapter 4 examines the internal organisation of the new Department

as it sought to prepare for ambitious expenditure reduction and lic sector reform agendas in tandem, and the role played by key policy entrepreneurs from inside and outside the administration in that pro-cess The chapter details the appointment of key personnel and the crea-tion and work of the Department’s Management Board and the Reform Delivery Office in developing and coordinating a wide-ranging set of reforms covering the periods 2011–2014 and 2014–2016 The chap-ter demonstrates that the window of opportunity presented by the cri-sis facilitated an ambitious reform agenda as well as the opportunity to frame public service reform as a vital part of the state’s response to the crisis

pub-The need to shrink the state in an orderly manner at a time when demand for public services was increasing would necessarily involve cutbacks and organisational rationalisation In Chap 5, the cutback approaches adopted prior to and after the creation of DPER are pre-sented, before the major organisational reform and rationalisation pro-jects undertaken by the Department are considered These include shared services, procurement consolidation, reform of information tech-nology infrastructure, state agency rationalisation and reforms in the state-owned enterprise sector The chapter concludes by looking at how reform and rationalisation measures were coordinated across the political and administrative arenas

Chapter 6 explores reform of the Irish public service bargain in the context of the crisis The need to amend the terms and conditions of public service employment was pursued through three pay agreements negotiated with public service unions in 2010, 2013 and 2015 All three are considered here, with attention focused on reforms to pay and pen-sions, and the harmonisation of public service employment arrange-ments Combined, these agreements were vital for facilitating the public service reform programme and avoiding industrial unrest that could have derailed the Irish economic recovery

In Chap 7, reforms to the public expenditure and budgetary tems are examined Beginning with an overview of the pre-crisis arrange-ments, the reforms are presented according to their sources, namely those

sys-influenced by the Troika, the EU and domestically inspired initiatives, respectively As well as documenting the efforts to introduce a performance budgeting regime, the chapter also examines the role played by new eco-nomic evaluation and fiscal policy institutions in shaping budgetary policy.Chapter 8 is concerned with the issue of public service culture and focuses in particular on a project titled ‘Civil Service Renewal’ through which a number of long-standing reform issues concerning accountabil-ity and performance were addressed The Renewal project was significant not alone for the ‘bottom-up’ nature of its development, but also for the new civil service accountability and management institutions it resulted

in As part of this chapter, the introduction of a strategic approach to human resource management is also presented

Finally, Chap 9 presents the range of reforms introduced to address criticisms of the Irish political system arising from the crisis, and which were designed to address a desire for greater ‘Openness, Transparency and Accountability’ in government Specifically, the issues of Freedom of Information, Protected Disclosures (or ‘whistleblowing’), lobbying and state board appointments are examined The promotion of more open government through digital means, including the development of more publicly accessible information on the state bureaucracy, also forms part

of this chapter

The book’s concluding chapter considers the consequences of the reforms identified in the preceding chapters for our understanding of public sector reform in practice, and of the Irish administrative system Reflections on what lessons, if any, from the Irish case might usefully apply in other states seeking to pursue administrative reform agendas are presented The implications of the Irish case for the study of cutback management are also summarised, before a final section considers the future of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform

1 In respect of economic policy, the findings of Alesina and Perotti (Alesina and Perotti 1995 ; Perotti 1998), amongst others (Reinhart and Rogoff

2010 ), have been influential in the fiscal consolidation approaches adopted

by governments post 2008 In particular, the argument that successful responses to crisis were those that relied mainly on cuts in public expendi- ture rather than taxation increases, roughly in a 2:1 ratio Work by Larch and Turrini which advocates large fiscal corrections implemented in a

short period of time dubbed ‘cold shower‘ consolidation, as compared to

‘more gradual episodes of adjustment’ (Larch and Turrini 2008 , p 3), also appears to have been influential in the Irish case.

2 Within organistional studies, such actors that challenge otherwise stable fields are referred to as ‘institutional entrepreneurs’ (Levy and Scully 2007 ).

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overview of the irish AdministrAtive

And PoliticAl systems

The Irish state consists of 4.8 million people employing a system of representative parliamentary democracy It achieved partial independence from Great Britain in 1922 to become the Irish Free State (Northern Ireland opted to remain fully within British jurisdiction) and was for-mally named a Republic in 1948 Ireland joined the European Union in

1973 It has a legal tradition based on the public interest model with its roots in the English common law system Irish law (including adminis-trative law) draws on a combination of the 1937 Constitution, EU law, statute law and judicial decisions

Bunreacht na hÉireann—the Constitution of Ireland—provides for a liberal form of democracy with judicial, legislative and executive powers allocated to different institutions of the state Judicial power is adminis-tered through the national court system, with the Supreme Court at its apex as the final court of appeal The legislative power of State is granted

to the Oireachtas—comprising a President and a national parliament The President—Uachatarán na hÉireann—is directly elected every 7 years as

Head of State but the office has no executive power and is confined to largely ceremonial duties The national parliament is a bicameral legisla-ture with the Lower House—Dáil Éireann—comprised of 158 directly elected representatives, and the Upper House—Seanad Éireann—com-prised of 60 indirectly elected Senators

Political and Administrative Context

© The Author(s) 2017

M MacCarthaigh, Public Sector Reform in Ireland, Executive

Politics and Governance, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57460-8_2