Ireland has a habit of making small, sensible decisions that later turn out to be anything but. Usually, they are taken quietly, under pressure, and justified as temporary fixes. Privatising electronic tagging looks like another of those moments. Modest in appearance, lasting in consequence.
As recently reported in The Irish Times, responsibility for electronic tagging is set to be outsourced to a private provider, framed as a practical response to prison overcrowding and operational strain.
At first glance, this appears modest and sensible. It is neither.
Electronic tagging is not simply a technical service or an administrative convenience. It is an extension of the sentencing power of the State. It determines where an individual may go, when they may leave their home, and whether they remain at liberty or are returned to custody. When conditions are breached, consequences are immediate and coercive. That places electronic monitoring firmly within the core functions of the justice system, not at its margins.
READ MORE
The real question, therefore, is not whether private companies can supply tagging technology. Of course they can. The more important question is whether the State should choose not to retain this capability itself.
This distinction matters because states rarely lose core capacities in dramatic moments. They lose them gradually, through decisions each justified as limited, technical or unavoidable. Outsourcing is almost never presented as a philosophical shift. It is always framed as a practical fix. Over time, however, these fixes accumulate. Internal expertise diminishes. Institutional memory fades. Oversight becomes contractual rather than institutional. Eventually, the capacity to design, operate and control critical systems no longer exists within the public sector.
Ireland has been here before.
The State did not announce its retreat from direct housing provision as a strategic choice. It happened incrementally, through years of decisions taken under pressure, each appearing reasonable in isolation. The result is a system that now struggles to respond at scale, having lost much of the organisational capacity required to do so. Few would argue this was intentional. It was, however, entirely predictable.
Justice differs from housing in one crucial respect. That is when justice systems fail, the consequences are not merely inconvenient. They can be catastrophic. Failures in monitoring, supervision or enforcement carry risks for victims, communities and public trust. In such contexts, clarity of responsibility matters as much as operational efficiency. When something goes wrong, the public needs to know who is accountable. That accountability must rest unambiguously with the State.
Privatisation complicates this clarity. While legal responsibility may remain with public authorities, operational control shifts. Oversight is mediated through contracts, performance indicators and service-level agreements. The things we know we are not good at managing: cost overruns on national children’s hospital; poorly planned bike sheds. This does not remove accountability, but it fragments it, creating grey areas that are poorly suited to systems exercising coercive power over citizens.
Supporters of outsourcing will point out, correctly, that safeguards can be written into contracts, that data governance frameworks can be robust, and that oversight mechanisms can be strengthened. These arguments are not without merit. But they miss the deeper issue. Contracts cannot substitute for capability. A State that lacks internal expertise becomes a weaker commissioner, less able to interrogate performance, challenge providers or adapt systems as needs change. Over time, dependency becomes normalised and alternatives quietly disappear.
There is also a question of trajectory. Electronic tagging is being presented as a discrete case. In reality, it sets a precedent. If monitoring can be outsourced, why not supervision analytics? Why not risk assessment tools? Why not elements of probation support? Each step can be justified individually. Taken together, they represent a significant reconfiguration of how justice is delivered. From direct public provision to systems managed by contract.
International experience suggests caution is warranted. Promised cost savings from privatising justice-related services are often modest and contested, while oversight challenges are persistent. More importantly, once such functions are outsourced, they are rarely brought back in-house. The decision is effectively one-way.
The argument that the State currently lacks the capacity to manage electronic tagging internally should give pause rather than comfort. Lack of capacity is not a natural condition. It is the result of earlier choices. Using it as justification for further withdrawal risks locking in a cycle where underinvestment becomes self-reinforcing.
A democratic state must decide which functions it can safely rely on markets to deliver and which it must always be able to perform itself. Coercive elements of the justice system should fall firmly into the latter category. This does not preclude private involvement in technology development or support services, but it does argue strongly for retaining operational control, expertise and accountability within public institutions.
The decision to privatise electronic tagging may look small. It is not. It signals something about how the State understands its own role and what it believes can be delegated. Once such signals are sent, they shape future decisions in ways that are difficult to reverse.
The question Ireland should be asking is not whether outsourcing electronic tagging will relieve immediate pressure on prisons. It is whether, in ten or fifteen years’ time, we want to be explaining,once again, how a core public capability quietly slipped beyond our reach.
Paul Davis is an Associate Professor at Dublin City University Business School, specialising in procurement, operations management and public sector strategy
