Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

That is the system. At the outset, some of my colleagues spoke of the bonfire of the quangos and so on. The point about reform is that people find difficult the minutiae and complexity of reform. Consequently, they decide to pick on something like increments, quangos or some totemic item that overall, is highly marginal. As for quangos, the vast bulk of non-governmental organisations that work in the public service, in terms of cost and numbers, are agencies such as Enterprise Ireland, the IDA, the National Roads Authority or the Environmental Protection Agency.

Those are the ones which take up all the funding and the vast bulk of the staff and, by almost uniform agreement, those are doing a good job and we need them.

We conducted an assessment when we came into office and we set out, as Deputy Fleming will recall, the three categories in 2011. In the first category, we identified 48 organisations that we would abolish, amalgamate or subsume. By the end of this year, 46 of those amalgamations will be completed. Of the two with which we did not proceed, one was the National Cancer Registry which we did not abolish for good reason and the other was the amalgamation of two aviation bodies, the Commission for Aviation Regulation and the Irish Aviation Authority, which, on advice, both domestically and from Europe, were needed to be kept separately. Everything else will be done.

We also stated we would review another set and a year late we published 25 actions. Some of them involve up to 100 bodies, for example, the VECs becoming-----