Professor Niamh Hardiman:

It was during the 2000s, especially the mid to late 2000s. It is not that these agencies are doing a bad job in what they are asked to do.

The problem is really about policy co-ordination. We have made it more difficult than we might really have to for ourselves to have good, coherent policy and to aggregate all the activities we can see going on in the different agencies. Some agencies have to be stand-alone and at arm's length from the Government. We have to have arm's-length regulatory agencies. It has worked out very well for Ireland to have, for example, a great deal of autonomy accorded to IDA Ireland. We need a lot of agencies but the problems of policy co-ordination can be problematic.