Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The short answer to that is "No". It was about the Government getting credit for it rather than a particular Department or agency. The Government is much wider than any political party or even the Independents who are in it. The Government includes Departments and it is a wider concept. My view for a long time has been and remains that Government is too siloised and that Departments and agencies operate very often as independent republics that do their own thing too much. I see part of my role as Taoiseach as being to bring about joined-up Government and to bring together Government policies, implementation and communications. There is a tendency sometimes on the part of Departments and agencies to engage in a lot of self-promotion, quite frankly. From the public's point of view, this is all the Government. The public does not really want to know which Department or agency it is. People want to know what the system is doing for them.

I thought one of the best campaigns co-ordinated by the strategic communications unit related to the self-employed and the rights and benefits we were extending to them, including paternity benefit, treatment benefit and invalidity pension for the first time. When Government is broken up into so many silos and agencies, however, the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection, for example, only sees people who are self-employed in terms of PRSI S-class contributions. That is how the Department sees it. It thinks of self-employed people as PRSI S-class payers for which they get certain benefits. The Department of Finance and the Revenue Commissioners only see self-employed people as those who pay self-employed tax and who get certain credits. The Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation only sees people who are self-employed through the prism of entrepreneurship, which leads to a very fragmented message, very fragmented policy-making and poor implementation. Part of my job as Taoiseach and of my Department is to join up Government and to bring together policy, implementation and communications. That is why we did it as a package when we decided to do something for the self-employed. We improved their social benefits, increased their tax credit and improved entrepreneurship supports. We had joined-up policy and implementation and we communicated it as a single campaign on what the Government of Ireland was doing to improve things for the self-employed. The old way was to have three Departments doing three different things without talking to each other or being joined-up at all.