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The Irish Times has reported that the Irish State has spent almost €600 million on 27 tribunals of inquiry and commissions of investigation since 1997.
According to reporting on the matter by journalist Harry McGee the cumulative cost of 10 tribunals and 17 commissions of investigation, and inquiries, amounts to €597 million, or an average of €22 million per inquiry.
The average duration of these processes exceeds five years, meaning the State routinely finds itself entangled in legalistic and administrative investigations spanning over half a decade. Three of the commissions, as noted by McGee relate to single deaths, costing €1 million or less.
This he contrasts with the cost of the Tribunal into Certain Planning Matters and Payments (Mahon Tribunal) that begun its work in 2012. It is estimated that this process on completion has cost in the region of €144 million.
Initially called the Flood Tribunal after its first chairman, Judge Feargus Flood, the body was tasked with investigating allegations of corrupt payments to politicians and officials in relation to planning permissions and land rezoning, particularly focusing on the operations of Dublin County Council during the 1990s, and particularly those that related to the involvement of former Fianna Fáil party minister Ray Burke.
The scope of the inquiry initially focused on 726 acres of land in north Dublin, but its terms were later expanded to cover broader allegations of suspect payments.
The Tribunal eventually concluded that Minister Ray Burke was found to have received at least €290,000 in corrupt payments, leading to a six-month jail sentence for tax evasion. However, its findings also had far-reaching political consequences beyond individual convictions.
More notably it also made significant and harsh criticisms of former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. The tribunal rejected Mr Ahern’s explanations for £165,000 in transactions, deeming them “untrue” and “implausible.”
It also concluded that former EU Commissioner for Social Affairs Pádraig Flynn received IR£50,000 from property developer Tom Gilmartin to influence planning decisions.
The Tribunal’s Final Report, spanning 3,270 pages, pointed to a deeply embedded culture of systemic corruption within Irish political and administrative life.
Today, the issue of escalating costs associated with tribunals and commissions has been thrust back onto the Irish political agenda following the eventual publication of the Final Report of the Farrelly Commission.
This Commission was established in April 2017 to investigate and establishing the facts regarding the role of public authorities in the care and protection of a service user, Grace (pseudonym), who resided with a former foster family (Family X) in the South East of Ireland between 1989 and 2009. The Terms of Reference also required the Commission to establish the facts with respect to Grace’s care and whether Grace had suffered abuse of any kind over that period.
The Report which is now known to have cost approximately €37m. This figure does not include the combined cost of additional reports into the care of Grace which are estimated to have cost approximately €750,000.
The Final Report however has sent shockwaves throughout Ireland’s political system. What has triggered widespread disbelief and disappointment across Ireland’s political establishment is the Report’s ultimate conclusion: while it found clear evidence of serious neglect and financial mismanagement, it found no evidence of sexual or emotional abuse
These findings have been met with disbelief and disappointment by Government and opposition figures alike including one of the most high-profile critics of the care provided to Grace, Fianna Fail TD John McGuinness. McGuiness had acted as Chair of the powerful Oireachtas Public Affairs Committee when the abuse of Grace was first discussed at parliamentary level in a series of bruising meetings with Irelands Health Service Executive.
Reacting to the Final Report, McGuinness commented that he had expected the report to “set out in plain language the background to the care of Grace, where it failed and why, who was responsible for what happened to Grace… I expected the basic rights of Grace to be vindicated.” The finding, McGuiness stated, was “a huge disappointment.”
It is anticipated that a full Dáil debate on the findings of the Farrelly Report will take place in the coming weeks, with costs and operational inefficiencies forming a key part of the discussion.
In this respect it should be noted that an attempt to develop processes that would significantly reduce this kind of exorbitant costs, was pioneered by the former Minister for Justice Michael McDowell when initiated the Commissions of Investigation Bill in 2003.
As he stated at the time, some of the most useful and significant ways this Bill would attempt to achieve cost reductions was through mechanisms related to the terms of reference of a commission. As McDowell rightly observed at the time, it had come to be recognised that having clear and well-defined terms of reference which are tightly drawn was often the key to a successful and swift investigation.
Unfortunately, as the Grace case and the 8-year long Farrelly Commission have clearly demonstrated, these mechanisms do not always work as efficiently or as effectively as anticipated.
Prior to the publication of the Final Report of the Farrelly Commission a strong signal was being sent out by Government that alternative mechanisms must be found apart from Tribunals, Inquires and Commissions of Investigation, which despite the best of intentions, have proven almost impossible to operate within their original terms of reference. Irelands Taoiseach Micheál Martin referenced this point recently during a parliamentary debate when he clearly flagged the level of legal fees incurred by the state during these investigations.
That being said the Taoiseach also recently confirmed that following the approval by both Dáil Éireann and Seanad Éireann he recently signed a Statutory Instrument to give effect to the formal establishment of yet another Tribunal of Inquiry, this time into the effectiveness of the complaints processes in the Defence Forces concerning workplace issues relating to discrimination, bullying, harassment, sexual harassment and sexual misconduct.
The Taoiseach also confirmed that Government was allocating €3.6m to support the establishment and the work of the Tribunal with further allocations for subsequent years to be agreed as part of the annual Estimates process for each year.
Given the history of Irelands Tribunals and Inquires there is very little confidence among political observers that the initial allocation of €3.6m will not double or treble before the conclusion of the process.
As Harry McGee has pointed out however, it need not necessarily be this way. McGee in his reporting, referred to above, highlights the example of the Nyberg Commission into Ireland’s banking collapse, which reported in 2011. That Commission, tasked with a critically important investigation into one of Ireland’s greatest financial disasters, completed its work within months and at a cost of just €1.2 million—a fraction of the costs typically associated with similar inquiries.
According to McGee, this Commission was a good example of a Commission working perfectly.
It remains to be seen whether Ireland’s political system has the appetite or capacity to replicate such efficiency in the future. Based on the evidence to date, optimism appears misplaced.
In reality, the persistence of spiralling costs is a reflection not only of legal and procedural complexity, but of the political culture surrounding inquiries themselves. Successive governments have often used tribunals and commissions as instruments of political management rather than solely as fact-finding bodies, providing the appearance of action while displacing immediate accountability. This dynamic—where inquiries become sprawling, self-perpetuating processes—has entrenched a system where delay, excessive legalism, and ballooning costs are not aberrations but predictable outcomes. Without structural reform of both the legal frameworks governing inquiries and the political incentives behind their creation, it is unlikely that even the best-drafted terms of reference will achieve meaningful change.