Independent TD Shane Ross in discussion recently.
Leo Varadkar, when in Opposition, did a superb paper on the quangos and he found that between 1997 and 2007 in the Bertie golden years there were 207 state agencies created.
There are 6,000 directors on the boards of quangos and Brendan Howlin is only going to tackle 28 and review 50 next year. This is not adequate.
I was at the PAC yesterday and the Pensions Board came in and we questioned them for about three or four hours. At the end of the day I didn’t know what they did.
There are 16 members on the board who are picked from political favourites and various social partners.
See here for full list of quangos
Does anyone really know how many Quangos there are?
According to a Sunday Times article in 2006 there were more than 800 quangos, 482 at national and 350 at local level, with a total of 5,784 individual appointees and a combined annual budget of €13 billion
The figures are truly staggering for such a small country. I see no hope of real reform without serious trouble
Thanks to the revelations every other day of how utterly
inept and profligate the irish state is,how corrupt of
thought, word and deed it was and continues to be.
i no longer feel as if im a passenger on the titanic
no now i feel as if im on the Hindenburg making its final
approach at lakehurst……ANYBODY GOT A MATCH?
The Sunday Times 800 number is a sloppy interpretation of a TASC report. There’s no definitive list. Any list that does exist is ambiguous about what a quango is. Some lists of quangos include universities, which is just plain stupid. Before banging on about quangos, we should agree what one is. Quango is a pejorative term these days, but its original meaning wasn’t pejorative.