Mr. Aidan O'Driscoll:

I have been around too long so I have heard a lot of these debates before. In the 1980s, it was very common to break off bits of Government Departments and set up agencies. This trend was referred to by the horrible word "agencification". It happened all over the world. The British in particular were leaders in this. It was part of a movement known as new public management. That happened here in Ireland too. A lot of pieces of Departments were detached and set up as agencies. One of the subsequent criticisms of this was the lack of political accountability that followed when functions were separated out into agencies. Sometimes that has to be done. An Garda Síochána could not be within the Department, for example, and nobody would suggest that. However the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service and its delivery area could be moved to an agency. The ERG indicated that it was considering this. However, I have seen service delivery operations within Departments. I would point to the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection and the Revenue Commissioners. A strong argument can be made that sometimes those service delivery functions work better inside a Department, particularly when the issue involved has a strong policy connection. It is very clear that immigration, certainly for now, has a very strong policy connection, both in Europe and Ireland. We have landed on a structure in which the immigration service delivery area remains inside the Department rather than being moved to a separate agency.

The virtue of bringing together all of the different functions, as shown in slide 34, is that some of these represent chains of decision-making. They are directly connected. To house them in different parts of the organisation, as we did previously, may be asking for trouble. This structure is much more likely to be able to sort it out. However, if the Deputy's eye falls on slide 34, he will see there are a lot of functions. It is a big area and a lot of work, involving between 800 and 900 people. It is, therefore, a big management job. We need to reflect on that further. As I said, this is why we asked EY to take a look at our immigration service delivery area specifically, almost as its staff were going out the door. EY has given us some information on that. We had already developed a service delivery improvement plan for immigration internally. That will be easier to implement in the new structure. This is a challenging area where the Department will see further development. We are not finished yet.