The aim of this project has been to examine the establishment, growth and evolution of Ireland’s state administration since the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922. It has been supported by a Thematic Research Grant from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences for 2007-10.  The objectives of the project are threefold:

• to enhance research capacity in Ireland and to provide the basis for high level cross-national comparison;
• to establish a data set that will be housed in the Geary Institute at UCD but available to the scholarly community on line;
• to develop our knowledge and understanding of the evolution of the Irish state and its public institutions.

The principal product of this research will be the Irish State Administration Database, which will constitute a major research infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences in Ireland and which will be of use to political scientists, historians, lawyers, sociologists and specialists in public policy. The database will record information about central government Departments, state agencies and other relevant public bodies and institutions. For each Department, it will identify and code the major sections or divisions with responsibility for distinct policy areas. It will track the foundation of each individual entity and subsequent changes (division into more than one institution, merger with another institution, major reorganization). In addition, the data set will record the founding legal instrument and subsequent legal alterations in the framework of the institution.

The data set will be incremental and dynamic – it will be possible to add more detail over time, for example to build in information about budget lines, personnel, and other quantitative data; to include detailed information about the task specifications of administrative units for specific points in time to track changes over longer time periods; and to provide links to other documentation such as enabling legislation, statutory instruments, etc as well as other databases.

The Irish State Administration Database (ISAD) was formally launched on 11 November at an event in Newman House. The database can be viewed at www.isad.ie.

Links to related projects:

Norwegian State Administration Database

Regulatory Agencies in the state of Flanders, Belgium

The American State Project