Events
Mapping the Irish State
Date: 23/06/2010
On 23rd June we held a seminar designed to acquaint members with the work being carried out by Dr Niamh Hardiman and her colleagues in the Geary Institute, UCD on a research programme entitled ‘Mapping the Irish State’’ The project, which involves building a database of state structures going back to the 1920s, was introduced to the group by Dr Hardiman herself. She described how the database makes it possible to analyse state agencies more fully than other studies to date. It puts forward a new way of classifying state agencies, using a multidimensional schema. It includes a wealth of information about organizational change over time and makes it possible to identify not only trends in the total number of agencies, but patterns of creation and cessation of agencies over time.
Members found the overall thrust of the exercise – that of developing a coherent framework for Agencies – to be very valuable and long overdue. The actual implications of the work were somewhat limited in interest, however, in that the key output is confined to a database and stops short of reaching conclusions which will inform future policy making and challenge current thinking. The database will have to be mined by others to elicit more specific and particular conclusions.