The Irish parliament and the scrutiny of departmental performance reports

Abstract

The public service reform agenda across the OECD has seen the roll-out of performance-reporting initiatives, which emphasise the results of public spending and enable parliaments to hold senior officials and ministers to account for performance. But do parliaments actually engage with this information? This paper examines the extent to which the Irish parliament (Dáil Éireann) engaged with departmental performance reports and finds that reports were largely ignored in Dáil Éireann's discussions on the annual budget. The paper concludes with a discussion on barriers to parliamentary engagement with performance information.

Keywords:

• Accountability
• Irish parliament
• performance information
• public service reform
• public spending

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank PMM's anonymous referees for their constructive comments and suggestions. All opinions expressed in this paper are personal views and do not in any way reflect the views of my employer.

Notes

* A TD is a member of Dáil Éireann, the lower house of the Oireachtas (the Irish parliament).