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

As a result, there are hundreds of external consultancies and these are very expensive. There are too many websites, logos and little empires. Ireland is an outlier when compared to other European countries in this regard. The idea was to streamline things; that is all. It was not to centralise everything in the Department of the Taoiseach. There was no proposal that specialist promotional agencies such as Tourism Ireland, IDA Ireland or Bord Bia should be controlled by the Department of the Taoiseach. That is absurd and a political charge. That was never intended, nor was it ever intended that it would apply to semi-State bodies, which are State-owned enterprises.

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