Why is Ireland so badly governed? To grasp the biggest structural explanation for why a state with an embarrassment of riches can’t get its act together to solve fundamental long-term problems, let’s consider three apparently unrelated vignettes.
The first is members of the Oireachtas, up to and including Ministers, pestering the Road Safety Authority to bump their constituents up the waiting list for driving tests.
Recently, The Irish Times revealed a 93 per cent year-on-year increase in emails to the RSA from public representatives, a large proportion of which were “looking for a test date for a constituent or for an update on a constituent’s driving test application”.
Among those asking for favourable treatment for constituents were Ministers for State Alan Dillon (who is supposed to be in charge, among other things, of the circular economy); Michael Healy-Rae (responsible for policy on forestry and horticulture); and Colm Brophy, who evidently has little to be doing in his day job as Minister of State for Migration.
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Bear in mind that what these Ministers – and various TDs and Senators – have been asking the RSA to do is grossly unethical and could even be illegal. Or at least it would be if they actually believed that it was going to have an effect. If the RSA complied with these requests, it would not just be giving an advantage to the individual concerned but, by definition, further delaying some poor unfortunate bumped down the waiting list. It would be a textbook case of maladministration.
But the RSA won’t actually do this – and the politicians know it won’t. It’s all an act: the never-ending charade known as imaginary patronage. The TD gets elected by maintaining an illusion of “pull”: I sorted that out for you. We pay these fellas €117,113 a year – and in the case of the junior Ministers we top it up with another €47,314 – in part to enable them to indulge in this pernicious nonsense. And to add insult to injury we also pay the salaries of many people at State agencies to do nothing except send polite replies to TDs to show to their constituents so they can blame public servants for not performing the requested favours.
Second, consider this figure: €4.1 billion. That’s roughly the amount of unbudgeted spending by Government departments last year. By unbudgeted I mean exactly that – this is expenditure that was not in the 2025 budget. Nor was it in the revised estimates issued at the end of 2024. Most of it was not even in the Summer Economic Statement released in July.
Now, the most basic function of the Dáil is to grant money for the running of the State and to oversee the spending of that money. If we have billions being spent outside of any budgetary framework, it is by definition outside even of any pretence at parliamentary authority or scrutiny. While TDs are off pestering the RSA and other public servants in the cause of imaginary patronage, they are not doing the job they are elected (and handsomely paid) to do. Last year, TDs asked 66,904 parliamentary questions. Just 1,888 of those (less than 3 per cent) were about public expenditure.
Exhibit three is the following list (courtesy of Finola Kennedy’s excellent book Local Matters): Local Government; Local Government and Public Health; Local Government; Environment; Environment and Local Government; Environment, Heritage and Local Government; Environment, Community and Local Government; Housing, Planning, Community and Local Government; Housing, Planning and Local Government; Housing, Local Government and Heritage.
These are, in chronological order, the names of the part of central government that is supposed to support local democracy. As Kennedy notes, “From 1997 ‘Local Government’ became an ‘add-on’ to a range of other ministerial responsibilities and never again ranked as the first name in the departmental title”. For 20 years before that it did not even appear in the title of a department.
The only major reform of local democracy this century has been a brutal demolition of the parts of it that were closest to communities, the town councils. Eighty of them were simply abolished by Fine Gael and Labour in 2014. Meanwhile, apart from Limerick, our main cities do not even have directly elected mayors. They are run (in Dublin’s case with obviously ruinous results) by appointed chief executives.
In October 2023, the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities – the pan-European political assembly representing local and regional authorities from the 46 member states of the Council of Europe – issued a damning report on local government in Ireland. It noted that “in many respects the position of local government is weaker in Ireland than in most other European countries. It has a more limited set of functions, represents a smaller share of public affairs and can only marginally influence the size of its resources.” While local authorities in the EU account on average for 23 per cent of public spending, in Ireland the equivalent figure is just 8 per cent.
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These three cameos are parts of the bigger picture of poorly performing government. Power is taken away from the places where it is easiest for citizens to wield it – in their own communities. The Dáil then becomes a giant county council, its members spending most of their time on issues that have no national consequence and on imaginary patronage that achieves nothing except wasting their time and our money.
The Government gets to do pretty much as it pleases – and in the case of the current Government that is very little indeed. In 2025, the Oireachtas passed fewer than 20 pieces of legislation – the lowest number by a new administration this century – and most of those were of minor import.
We could do two immediate things to make government work better. One would be to build serious local and regional authorities. The other would be to ban imaginary patronage. Make it illegal for elected representatives to urge public bodies to behave improperly by favouring their constituents over other citizens. They might then have to do the jobs we pay them for.
