Muiris Maccárthaigh
Biographic Data
| ID | 3481058 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Muiris Maccárthaigh |
| GIVEN NAMES | Muiris |
| FAMILY NAME | Maccárthaigh |
| SIGNATURE | MACCÁRTHAIGH M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen's University Belfast |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2296-3049 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 72 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Stuck in the waiting room: Citizen experiences of administrative limbo in three European crises
In recent years, there have been numerous cases where citizens have found themselves stuck in highly protracted administrative processes affecting outcomes vital to their lives and livelihoods. However, systematic inquiries into the experience of being trapped by bureaucratic procedures or state inaction for sometimes multiple years are still lacking. To study the interactions between citizens and the state when long waiting times and significant…
Priming the state: Continuity and junctures in the foundation of the Irish administration
A principle of continuity was baked into the political and legal instruments underpinning the embryonic Irish state. At the same time, a process of evolutionary change we call 'administrative greening' was initiated, which we examine here and in Greening the Irish State: Early Legislative and Administrative Dynamics. Irish Political Studies, XXX, XXX). In this first article, we highlight the extent to which these dynamics shaped the formative or …
Greening the Irish State: Early Legislative and Administrative Dynamics
The establishment of Saorstt ireann (the Irish Free State) in 1922 did not herald a fundamental overhaul of the administrative machinery inherited from Whitehall and Dublin Castle. Path dependent continuities in legislation and executive orders underpinned the new dispensation. At the same time, a process of evolutionary change, which we call 'administrative greening', was underway. Drawing on data in the Irish State Administration Database (ISAD…
Parliament
As it enters its second century, the Irish parliament – the Oireachtas – remains the central political institution in Irish public life. This chapter presents a detailed analysis of the Oireachtas: its functions and performance as well as its strengths, weaknesses and reform efforts. First, the parliament is placed in comparative international context, before the basic features, organisation and business of both its houses – Dáil Éireann and Sean…
Nature or nurture? Agency life‐cycles as a function of institutional legacy, political environment, and organizational hardwiring
A growing body of literature attempts to explain the life‐cycles of public sector organizations. Of particular interest have been the form and incidence of their birth and termination, and connecting these events to such variables as legal status and political ideology. Less attention has been given to the effect of intermediary life‐cycle events, the tasks performed by agencies, and their policy domains. This study builds on existing fixed chara…
It's about time! Temporal dynamics and longitudinal research designs in public administration
Many of the fundamental research questions in public administration relate to individual‐ or organization‐level temporal dynamics, including the impact of public sector reforms, (in)stability of public policies and organizations, development of public service motivation, or the workplace socialization of public employees. However, theoretical, methodological, and empirical public administration scholarship continues to take time and temporal dyna…
Public policy accumulation in Ireland: The Changing Profile of Ministerial Departments 1922–2022
The relationship between the policy ambitions of political incumbents and the organisation of the state administration to achieve them is complex and fluid, and cross-sectional studies provide useful but limited insights into how this relationship is evolving. There is evidence that the challenge of managing and coordinating the modern state’s stock of public policies is under considerable pressure, however, arising from the accumulation of incre…
Parliamentary Accountability and Reform
The assertion that the Irish parliament, Oireachtas Éireann, or more specifically its lower house Dáil Éireann, is poor at if not incapable of fulfilling its constitutional role of holding the government to account is an established feature of the study of Irish politics. In this chapter, the development of parliamentary accountability is examined in constitutional and comparative contexts. This is achieved by first looking at the idea of account…
Accounting for the past: The role of public apologies in Ireland
Demands for accountability are a prominent feature of contemporary public life. Although much academic attention has focused on perceived denials of accountability and blame avoidance in various political, administrative and transitional justice contexts, there has been much less analysis of blame acceptance and efforts to provide accountability. This paper explores attempts to provide such accountability through the medium of public apologies. I…
Exploiting conditionality: EU and international actors and post-NPM reform in Ireland
Between 2008 and 2015, Ireland undertook unprecedented and systemic public sector reforms in a polity not traditionally considered a prominent reformer. While some of these reforms comprised part of the loan programme agreement with EU and international actors, many others did not. This article argues that the crisis in Ireland provided a window of opportunity to introduce reforms that political and administrative elites had previously found diff…
Public service integration in hard times: Merging unemployment benefit and labour market activation measures
The creation of Intreo as a one-stop shop for jobseekers in Ireland occurred during the financial and sovereign debt crisis period of 2010–16. The organisational merger was the product of an extensive programme of successful administrative reorganisation and service integration that deserves attention. This article begins with an overview of the policy to merge insurance-based unemployment benefit, discretionary social welfare payments and labour…
Tangling with the Troika: ‘Domestic ownership’ as political and administrative engagement in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal
This paper analyses variation in the degrees of difficulty involved in negotiating and implementing loan programmes with the international lenders in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal. All three countries displayed high degrees of ultimate compliance with fiscal consolidation and structural adjustment conditionality, but the pace of implementation varied significantly. This paper argues that ‘domestic ownership’ of the loan programmes is a key determ…
Administrative Culture
Administrative culture is an established and prominent theme in public administration research. It is frequently used to explain or contextualize a variety of phenomena in the discipline, ranging from differences in governing styles and policy outcomes between national bureaucracies to making sense of the informal norms and values that determine the activities of individual public organizations and how they interact with political and non-state i…
Coordination in Europe
In this chapter, one of the oldest challenges faced by governments is explored. Beginning with an examination of why coordination has remained such a dominant theme in public administration and management, the chapter surveys classical and more recent scholarship on the topic, and unpacks its multiple and increasingly diverse meanings and conceptualizations. As part of this study, coordination is considered in relation to process, management prac…
Public Sector Reform in Ireland
Commissions and Local Government Reform: Expressed Leadership Identities of Commissioners in Inquiries Proposing Municipal Mergers in Northern Ireland and New South Wales
Commissions of inquiry are frequently used as venue‐alteration mechanisms to investigate and “depoliticize” local government reforms. Through the application of a leadership identity framework that examines the judgments commission chairs make during the course of the inquiry, this article explores the roles commission chairs play as interpretive authorities. The judgments that commission chairs make about the scope of stakeholder engagement and …
State Retrenchment and Administrative Reform in Ireland: Probing Comparative Policy Paradigms
Policy choices in response to crisis may carry consequences both for distributive outcomes and for the future policy capacity of the state itself. This paper uses conceptual heuristics to interpret policy practice. It examines the underlying policy paradigms shaping Irish government decisions in the aftermath of the European financial and economic crisis. Drawing on comparative political economy literature, it distinguishes between two such parad…
Managing for Legitimacy: Agency Governance in Its “Deep” Constitutional Context
Recent literature on bureaucratic structure has gone further than studying discretions given to bureaucrats in policy making, and much attention is now paid to understanding how bureaucratic agencies are managed. This article proposes that the way in which executive governments manage their agencies varies according to their constitutional setting and that this relationship is driven by considerations of the executive's governing legitimacy. Insp…
Reforming the Westminster Model of Agency Governance: Britain and Ireland After the Crisis
Conventional understandings of what the Westminster model implies anticipate reliance on a top‐down, hierarchical approach to budgetary accountability, reinforced by a post–New Public Management emphasis on recentralizing administrative capacity. This article, based on a comparative analysis of the experiences of Britain and Ireland, argues that the Westminster model of bureaucratic control and oversight itself has been evolving, hastened in larg…
The Politics of Fiscal Efforts in Ireland and Spain: Market Credibility vs. Political Legitimacy
National governments within the eurozone have had to face tough choices between the need to devise policy responses to stabilise market expectations and the pressure to maintain responsiveness and accountability to their own voters. As Hindmoor and McConnell argue in Chapter 1 of this volume, the dynamics of political competition between the main political parties are central to accounting for what governments choose to do. We wish to show that c…
Fiscal politics in time: Pathways to fiscal consolidation in Ireland, Greece, Britain, and Spain, 1980–2012
The comparative study of debt and fiscal consolidation has acquired a new focus in the wake of the global financial crisis. This paper re-evaluates the literature on fiscal consolidation that flourished during the 1980s and 1990s. The conventional approach to explanation is based on segmenting episodes of fiscal change into discrete observations. We argue that this misses the dynamic features of government strategy, especially in the choices made…
Bicameralism in the Republic of Ireland: The Seanad Abolition Referendum
Whether or not a legislature is uni- or bi-cameral has been found to have important consequences. Ireland's 1937 constitution provided for a directly elected lower chamber (Dáil Éireann) and an indirectly elected upper chamber (Seanad Éireann). With the appointment to government in 2011 of two political parties with a common electoral commitment to abolish bicameralism, the subsequent coalition agreement included a promise to hold a referendum of…
Agency Termination in Ireland: Culls and Bonfires, or Life After Death
The termination of state agencies has been a prominent aspect of administrative ‘rationalization’ programmes arising from the Global Financial Crisis. In this article, the frequency and type of agency terminations that have occurred in Ireland post‐2008 are examined in longitudinal perspective. Following a consideration of agency types, the logic of agency rationalization is explored with a focus on the different ways in which agencies are termin…
How Governments Retrench in Crisis: The Case of Ireland
The New Politics of Austerity: Fiscal Responses to Crisis in Ireland and Spain
Agency Termination in Ireland: Culls and Bonfires, or Life After Death
The termination of state agencies has been a prominent aspect of administrative ‘rationalization’ programmes arising from the Global Financial Crisis. In this article, the frequency and type of agency terminations that have occurred in Ireland post‐2008 are examined in longitudinal perspective. Following a consideration of agency types, the logic of agency rationalization is explored with a focus on the different ways in which agencies are termin…
Exploiting conditionality: EU and international actors and post-NPM reform in Ireland
Between 2008 and 2015, Ireland undertook unprecedented and systemic public sector reforms in a polity not traditionally considered a prominent reformer. While some of these reforms comprised part of the loan programme agreement with EU and international actors, many others did not. This article argues that the crisis in Ireland provided a window of opportunity to introduce reforms that political and administrative elites had previously found diff…
State Retrenchment and Administrative Reform in Ireland: Probing Comparative Policy Paradigms
Policy choices in response to crisis may carry consequences both for distributive outcomes and for the future policy capacity of the state itself. This paper uses conceptual heuristics to interpret policy practice. It examines the underlying policy paradigms shaping Irish government decisions in the aftermath of the European financial and economic crisis. Drawing on comparative political economy literature, it distinguishes between two such parad…
Reforming the Westminster Model of Agency Governance: Britain and Ireland After the Crisis
Conventional understandings of what the Westminster model implies anticipate reliance on a top‐down, hierarchical approach to budgetary accountability, reinforced by a post–New Public Management emphasis on recentralizing administrative capacity. This article, based on a comparative analysis of the experiences of Britain and Ireland, argues that the Westminster model of bureaucratic control and oversight itself has been evolving, hastened in larg…
Fiscal politics in time: Pathways to fiscal consolidation in Ireland, Greece, Britain, and Spain, 1980–2012
The comparative study of debt and fiscal consolidation has acquired a new focus in the wake of the global financial crisis. This paper re-evaluates the literature on fiscal consolidation that flourished during the 1980s and 1990s. The conventional approach to explanation is based on segmenting episodes of fiscal change into discrete observations. We argue that this misses the dynamic features of government strategy, especially in the choices made…
Politics, Policy Preferences and the Evolution of Irish Bureaucracy: A Framework for Analysis
Analysis of the Irish state's administrative system is an unaccountably neglected area of systematic academic inquiry. This is all the more difficult to account for in view of the dynamic relationship between government actors and the public bureaucracy in realizing political goals. This paper identifies some distinguishing institutional features and dominant trends in Irish politico-administrative governance, and suggests avenues for future inqu…
Administrative Culture
Administrative culture is an established and prominent theme in public administration research. It is frequently used to explain or contextualize a variety of phenomena in the discipline, ranging from differences in governing styles and policy outcomes between national bureaucracies to making sense of the informal norms and values that determine the activities of individual public organizations and how they interact with political and non-state i…
Bicameralism in the Republic of Ireland: The Seanad Abolition Referendum
Whether or not a legislature is uni- or bi-cameral has been found to have important consequences. Ireland's 1937 constitution provided for a directly elected lower chamber (Dáil Éireann) and an indirectly elected upper chamber (Seanad Éireann). With the appointment to government in 2011 of two political parties with a common electoral commitment to abolish bicameralism, the subsequent coalition agreement included a promise to hold a referendum of…
Joined-Up Government in Ireland: From Un-Strategic Choices to Patriotic Imperatives
Over the last decade, joined-up government has assumed a prominent place in the study and practice of public management. In this article, drawing on the Irish case we adopt an institutionalist approach to the issue of joining-up government and bureaucratic reform. We explore how the period of sustained and rapid economic growth in Ireland during the 1990s was also characterised by a fragmentation of the public service and proliferation of agencie…
Managing state-owned enterprises in an age of crisis: An analysis of Irish experience
As with all aspects of public management, the control, financing, and regulation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are matters subject to changing international trends and domestic political imperatives. The effects of the global financial crisis (GFC) on the ownership, financing, and role of SOEs are still unfolding, but undoubtedly will be heavily influenced by a new era of public sector reforms principally designed to reassert central politica…
Priming the state: Continuity and junctures in the foundation of the Irish administration
A principle of continuity was baked into the political and legal instruments underpinning the embryonic Irish state. At the same time, a process of evolutionary change we call 'administrative greening' was initiated, which we examine here and in Greening the Irish State: Early Legislative and Administrative Dynamics. Irish Political Studies, XXX, XXX). In this first article, we highlight the extent to which these dynamics shaped the formative or …
Greening the Irish State: Early Legislative and Administrative Dynamics
The establishment of Saorstt ireann (the Irish Free State) in 1922 did not herald a fundamental overhaul of the administrative machinery inherited from Whitehall and Dublin Castle. Path dependent continuities in legislation and executive orders underpinned the new dispensation. At the same time, a process of evolutionary change, which we call 'administrative greening', was underway. Drawing on data in the Irish State Administration Database (ISAD…
Public policy accumulation in Ireland: The Changing Profile of Ministerial Departments 1922–2022
The relationship between the policy ambitions of political incumbents and the organisation of the state administration to achieve them is complex and fluid, and cross-sectional studies provide useful but limited insights into how this relationship is evolving. There is evidence that the challenge of managing and coordinating the modern state’s stock of public policies is under considerable pressure, however, arising from the accumulation of incre…
Irish political data 2001
Irish political data 2001
National Parliaments within the Enlarged European Union: From 'victims' Of Integration To Competitive Actors?
1. Introduction: Deparliamentarization Through European Integration? Part 1: National Parliaments and European Integration 2. Accountability through National Parliaments: Practice and Problems 3. Interparliamentary Cooperation within Europe 4. European Scrutiny in National Parliaments: Individual Efforts in the Collective Interest 5. National Parliaments in the EU Constitutional Treaty Part 2: National Parliaments in the 'Old' European Union 6. T…
Theories on Similarities and Dissimilarities Across Agencies
In this chapter we formulate hypotheses on variations in autonomy, control and internal management among agencies, based on three perspectives: (1) a structural-instrumental perspective (emphasizing formal organizational structure and rational choice of actors), (2) a cultural-institutional perspective (emphasizing organizational culture and organizational path dependency) and (3) a task-specific perspective (emphasizing the characteristics of or…
Autonomy and Control of State Agencies
By comparing the autonomy, control and internal management of public organizations, this book show how New Public Management doctrines work out in three small European states with different politico-a
Managing state-owned enterprises in an age of crisis: An analysis of Irish experience
As with all aspects of public management, the control, financing, and regulation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are matters subject to changing international trends and domestic political imperatives. The effects of the global financial crisis (GFC) on the ownership, financing, and role of SOEs are still unfolding, but undoubtedly will be heavily influenced by a new era of public sector reforms principally designed to reassert central politica…
Joined-Up Government in Ireland: From Un-Strategic Choices to Patriotic Imperatives
Over the last decade, joined-up government has assumed a prominent place in the study and practice of public management. In this article, drawing on the Irish case we adopt an institutionalist approach to the issue of joining-up government and bureaucratic reform. We explore how the period of sustained and rapid economic growth in Ireland during the 1990s was also characterised by a fragmentation of the public service and proliferation of agencie…
The New Politics of Austerity: Fiscal Responses to Crisis in Ireland and Spain
Politics, Policy Preferences and the Evolution of Irish Bureaucracy: A Framework for Analysis
Analysis of the Irish state's administrative system is an unaccountably neglected area of systematic academic inquiry. This is all the more difficult to account for in view of the dynamic relationship between government actors and the public bureaucracy in realizing political goals. This paper identifies some distinguishing institutional features and dominant trends in Irish politico-administrative governance, and suggests avenues for future inqu…
How Governments Retrench in Crisis: The Case of Ireland
Agency Termination in Ireland: Culls and Bonfires, or Life After Death
The termination of state agencies has been a prominent aspect of administrative ‘rationalization’ programmes arising from the Global Financial Crisis. In this article, the frequency and type of agency terminations that have occurred in Ireland post‐2008 are examined in longitudinal perspective. Following a consideration of agency types, the logic of agency rationalization is explored with a focus on the different ways in which agencies are termin…
The Politics of Fiscal Efforts in Ireland and Spain: Market Credibility vs. Political Legitimacy
National governments within the eurozone have had to face tough choices between the need to devise policy responses to stabilise market expectations and the pressure to maintain responsiveness and accountability to their own voters. As Hindmoor and McConnell argue in Chapter 1 of this volume, the dynamics of political competition between the main political parties are central to accounting for what governments choose to do. We wish to show that c…
Fiscal politics in time: Pathways to fiscal consolidation in Ireland, Greece, Britain, and Spain, 1980–2012
The comparative study of debt and fiscal consolidation has acquired a new focus in the wake of the global financial crisis. This paper re-evaluates the literature on fiscal consolidation that flourished during the 1980s and 1990s. The conventional approach to explanation is based on segmenting episodes of fiscal change into discrete observations. We argue that this misses the dynamic features of government strategy, especially in the choices made…
Bicameralism in the Republic of Ireland: The Seanad Abolition Referendum
Whether or not a legislature is uni- or bi-cameral has been found to have important consequences. Ireland's 1937 constitution provided for a directly elected lower chamber (Dáil Éireann) and an indirectly elected upper chamber (Seanad Éireann). With the appointment to government in 2011 of two political parties with a common electoral commitment to abolish bicameralism, the subsequent coalition agreement included a promise to hold a referendum of…
State Retrenchment and Administrative Reform in Ireland: Probing Comparative Policy Paradigms
Policy choices in response to crisis may carry consequences both for distributive outcomes and for the future policy capacity of the state itself. This paper uses conceptual heuristics to interpret policy practice. It examines the underlying policy paradigms shaping Irish government decisions in the aftermath of the European financial and economic crisis. Drawing on comparative political economy literature, it distinguishes between two such parad…
Managing for Legitimacy: Agency Governance in Its “Deep” Constitutional Context
Recent literature on bureaucratic structure has gone further than studying discretions given to bureaucrats in policy making, and much attention is now paid to understanding how bureaucratic agencies are managed. This article proposes that the way in which executive governments manage their agencies varies according to their constitutional setting and that this relationship is driven by considerations of the executive's governing legitimacy. Insp…
Reforming the Westminster Model of Agency Governance: Britain and Ireland After the Crisis
Conventional understandings of what the Westminster model implies anticipate reliance on a top‐down, hierarchical approach to budgetary accountability, reinforced by a post–New Public Management emphasis on recentralizing administrative capacity. This article, based on a comparative analysis of the experiences of Britain and Ireland, argues that the Westminster model of bureaucratic control and oversight itself has been evolving, hastened in larg…
Public Sector Reform in Ireland
Commissions and Local Government Reform: Expressed Leadership Identities of Commissioners in Inquiries Proposing Municipal Mergers in Northern Ireland and New South Wales
Commissions of inquiry are frequently used as venue‐alteration mechanisms to investigate and “depoliticize” local government reforms. Through the application of a leadership identity framework that examines the judgments commission chairs make during the course of the inquiry, this article explores the roles commission chairs play as interpretive authorities. The judgments that commission chairs make about the scope of stakeholder engagement and …
Coordination in Europe
In this chapter, one of the oldest challenges faced by governments is explored. Beginning with an examination of why coordination has remained such a dominant theme in public administration and management, the chapter surveys classical and more recent scholarship on the topic, and unpacks its multiple and increasingly diverse meanings and conceptualizations. As part of this study, coordination is considered in relation to process, management prac…
Public service integration in hard times: Merging unemployment benefit and labour market activation measures
The creation of Intreo as a one-stop shop for jobseekers in Ireland occurred during the financial and sovereign debt crisis period of 2010–16. The organisational merger was the product of an extensive programme of successful administrative reorganisation and service integration that deserves attention. This article begins with an overview of the policy to merge insurance-based unemployment benefit, discretionary social welfare payments and labour…
Tangling with the Troika: ‘Domestic ownership’ as political and administrative engagement in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal
This paper analyses variation in the degrees of difficulty involved in negotiating and implementing loan programmes with the international lenders in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal. All three countries displayed high degrees of ultimate compliance with fiscal consolidation and structural adjustment conditionality, but the pace of implementation varied significantly. This paper argues that ‘domestic ownership’ of the loan programmes is a key determ…
Administrative Culture
Administrative culture is an established and prominent theme in public administration research. It is frequently used to explain or contextualize a variety of phenomena in the discipline, ranging from differences in governing styles and policy outcomes between national bureaucracies to making sense of the informal norms and values that determine the activities of individual public organizations and how they interact with political and non-state i…
Exploiting conditionality: EU and international actors and post-NPM reform in Ireland
Between 2008 and 2015, Ireland undertook unprecedented and systemic public sector reforms in a polity not traditionally considered a prominent reformer. While some of these reforms comprised part of the loan programme agreement with EU and international actors, many others did not. This article argues that the crisis in Ireland provided a window of opportunity to introduce reforms that political and administrative elites had previously found diff…
Parliamentary Accountability and Reform
The assertion that the Irish parliament, Oireachtas Éireann, or more specifically its lower house Dáil Éireann, is poor at if not incapable of fulfilling its constitutional role of holding the government to account is an established feature of the study of Irish politics. In this chapter, the development of parliamentary accountability is examined in constitutional and comparative contexts. This is achieved by first looking at the idea of account…
Accounting for the past: The role of public apologies in Ireland
Demands for accountability are a prominent feature of contemporary public life. Although much academic attention has focused on perceived denials of accountability and blame avoidance in various political, administrative and transitional justice contexts, there has been much less analysis of blame acceptance and efforts to provide accountability. This paper explores attempts to provide such accountability through the medium of public apologies. I…
Political science (31 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (19 works) · Economics (15 works) · Public Administration (14 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (14 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Public Policy and Administration Research (11 works) · Business (9 works) · Irish (9 works)