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Government of Ireland Rialtas na hÉireann
Overview
Established	29 December 1937 (1937-12-29)
State	Ireland
Leader	Taoiseach
Appointed by	Taoiseach approved by Oireachtas, ceremonially appointed by the President
Main organ	Cabinet
Ministries	16
Responsible to	Oireachtas
Headquarters	Government Buildings, Merrion Street, Dublin
Website	gov.ie

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The Government of Ireland (Template:Lang-ga) is the cabinet that exercises executive authority in Ireland.

The Constitution of Ireland vests executive authority in a government which is headed by the Taoiseach, the head of government. The government is composed of government ministers, all of whom must be members of the Irish parliament, called the Oireachtas. The Taoiseach must be nominated and approved by the Dáil Éireann, the house of representatives of the Oireachtas. Following the nomination of the Dáil, the President of Ireland appoints the Taoiseach to their role. The President also appoints members of the government, including the Tánaiste, the deputy head of government, on nomination of the Taoiseach and their approval by the Dáil. The government is dependent upon the Oireachtas to pass primary legislation and as such, the government needs to command a majority in the Dáil in order to ensure support and confidence for budgets and government bills to pass. The Government is also known as the cabinet.

The current government took office on 14 June 2017 with Leo Varadkar, leader of Fine Gael, as Taoiseach. The Tánaiste is Simon Coveney, the deputy leader of Fine Gael, who took office on 30 November 2017. It is a minority government with Fine Gael and Independent members that in the previous Dáil had a confidence and supply arrangement with Fianna Fáil. A general election took place on 8 February 2020. The members of the 33rd Dáil met for the first time on 20 February 2020. Leo Varadkar was proposed as Taoiseach, and was defeated, but no other candidate was successfully nominated. Varadkar tendered his resignation to the president, but the members of the 31st Government continue to carry on their duties until their successors have been appointed.

Membership

Membership of the cabinet is regulated by Article 28 of the Constitution of Ireland and by the Ministers and Secretaries Acts 1924 to 2017. The Constitution requires the government to consist of between seven and fifteen members, all of whom must be a member of the Oireachtas.

Since the formation of the 12th Government of Ireland in 1966, all Irish cabinets have been formed with the constitutional maximum of fifteen ministers. The total sometimes falls below this number for brief periods following the resignation of individual ministers or the withdrawal of a party from a coalition.

No more than two members of the cabinet may be members of Seanad Éireann. All other members of the cabinet must be members of Dáil Éireann, the house of representatives. The Taoiseach, Tánaiste and Minister for Finance must be members of the Dáil. In practice, however, the members of the cabinet are invariably members of the Dáil. Since the adoption of the 1937 constitution, only two ministers have been appointed from the Seanad: Seán Moylan who served in 1957 as Minister for Agriculture and James Dooge who served as Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1981 to 1982. Joseph Connolly, a member of the Free State Seanad, had served in the Executive Council of the Irish Free State from 1932 to 1933 as Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, and from 1933 to 1936 as Minister for Lands and Fisheries.

Members of the government in charge of Department of State are designated Ministers of Government (before 1977 a Minister of State). For distinction, Ministers of State (known before 1977 as Parliamentary Secretaries) — informally called junior ministers — are not members of the Government, but assist the Government Ministers in their Departments. A minister without portfolio may be appointed to the Government who is not the head of a Department of State; this occurred during the period known in Ireland as the Emergency when Frank Aiken served as Minister for the Co-ordination of Defensive Measures from 1939 until 1945. The functions of government ministers are frequently transferred between departments during cabinet reshuffles or after elections. On occasion, a department of state will cease to exist, with its functions transferred to another department. Such defunct ministerial positions include the Ministers for Labour, Posts and Telegraphs, Public Service and Supplies.

Non-members attending cabinet

Non-members have no voting rights at Cabinet but may otherwise participate fully, and normally receive circulated cabinet papers on the same basis as a full member of Government. Votes are rare, however, with the cabinet usually following the Taoiseach or working by consensus.

The Government is advised by the Attorney General, who is not formally a member of the Government, but who participates in cabinet meetings as part of their role as legal advisor to the Government.

The Chief Whip may attend meetings of the cabinet, but is not a member of the Government. In addition, the Government can choose other Ministers of State who may attend cabinet meetings. This person is informally known as a "super junior minister". Currently Paul Kehoe, Mary Mitchell O'Connor and Finian McGrath are Ministers of State who attend cabinet. Trinity College Dublin law professor Oran Doyle has argued that this practice breaches cabinet confidentiality as required by the Constitution.

Term of office

A new government is formed by the Taoiseach appointed after each general election, and all members of the government are deemed to have resigned on the resignation of the Taoiseach. Therefore, a new government is appointed where there is a new Taoiseach within a single Dáil term. The Constitution allows a Dáil term of no more than seven years, but a shorter period may be specified by law; this has been set as a maximum of five years. The Taoiseach may at any time advise the President to dissolve the Dáil, prompting a new general election. The President retains an absolute discretion to refuse to grant a dissolution to a Taoiseach. To date, no President has refused the request of a Taoiseach to dissolve the Dáil.

The Taoiseach must enjoy the confidence of Dáil Éireann to remain in office. If the Taoiseach ceases "to retain the support of a majority in Dáil Éireann", the Taoiseach must resign unless they seek a dissolution of the Dáil which is granted by the President. This applies only in cases of a motion of no confidence or loss of supply (rejection of a budget), rather than the defeat of the government in other legislation or Dáil votes.

The Taoiseach can direct the President to dismiss or accept the resignation of individual ministers. When the Taoiseach resigns, the entire Government is deemed to have resigned as a collective. However, in such a scenario, according to the Constitution, "the Taoiseach and the other members of the Government shall continue to carry on their duties until their successors shall have been appointed".

Upon the dissolution of Dáil Éireann, ministers are no longer members of the Oireachtas. However, the Constitution also provides that "the members of the Government in office at the date of a dissolution of Dáil Éireann shall continue to hold office until their successors shall have been appointed".

Caretaker Government

Where the resignation of the Taoiseach and government is not immediately followed by the appointment by the president of a new Taoiseach on the nomination of the Dáil, the outgoing government continues as a caretaker government to "carry out their duties until their successors have been appointed". This has happened when no candidate was nominated for Taoiseach when the Dáil first assembled after a general election, or, on one occasion, where a Taoiseach had lost the confidence of the Dáil, but there was not a dissolution of the Dáil followed by a general election.

Authority and powers

Unlike the cabinets in other parliamentary systems, the Government is both the de jure and de facto executive authority in Ireland. In some other parliamentary regimes, the head of state is the nominal chief executive, though bound by convention to act on the advice of the cabinet. In Ireland, however, the Constitution explicitly vests executive authority in the Government, not the President.

The executive authority of the Government is subject to certain limitations. In particular:

• The state may not declare war, or participate in a war, without the consent of the Dáil. In the case of "actual invasion", however, "the Government may take whatever steps they may consider necessary for the protection of the State".
• Treaties must be laid before Dáil Éireann.
• The Government must act in accordance with the Constitution.

Government ministers are collectively responsible for the actions of the government. Each minister is responsible for the actions of his or her department. Departments of State do not have legal personalities. Actions of departments are carried out under the title of ministers even, as is commonly the case, when the minister has little knowledge of the details of these actions. This contradicts the rule in common law that a person given a statutory power cannot delegate that power. This leads to a phrase in correspondence by government departments, "the Minister has directed me to write", on letters or documents that the minister in question may never have seen.

If the Government, or any member of the government, should fail to fulfil its constitutional duties, it may be ordered to do so by a court of law, by a writ of mandamus. Ministers who fail to comply may, ultimately, be found to be in contempt of court, and even imprisoned.

History

Prior to independence, the executive of the unilaterally declared Irish Republic was the Ministry of Dáil Éireann. This was in operation from 1919 to 1922. After the approval of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in January 1922, a Provisional Government of Ireland was established as the executive. The personnel of the Provisional Government overlapped with the Ministry of Dáil Éireann, but they were not identical. On the independence of the Irish Free State on 6 December 1922, both executives were succeeded by the Executive Council of the Irish Free State. On 29 December 1937, on the coming into force of the Constitution of Ireland, the Eighth Executive Council of the Irish Free State became the First Government of Ireland.

The detail and structure of the Government of Ireland has its legislative basis in the Ministers and Secretaries Act 1924; it has been amended on a number occasions, and these may be cited together as the Ministers and Secretaries Acts 1924 to 2017 and are construed together as one Act.

All Governments from 1989 to 2016 were coalitions of two or more parties. The first coalition government was formed in 1948. The Taoiseach has always been a member of the largest party in the coalition. The Taoiseach has almost always been the leader of that party, with John A. Costello, Taoiseach from 1948 to 1951 and from 1954 to 1957, the only exception to this rule.

Public service

The public service in Ireland refers to the totality of public administration in Ireland. As of Q3, 2016 the total number of employees in the Irish public service stands at 304,472 people. The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform defines the public service as comprising seven sectors: the Civil Service, Defence Sector, Education Sector, Health Sector, Justice Sector, Local Authorities and Non-Commercial State Agencies; such as Bord Bia, IDA Ireland and the Commission for Energy Regulation. Commercial state-owned bodies such as RTÉ, ESB Group and An Post are not considered part of the public service in Ireland.

The largest sector is the health sector with over 105,000 employees (largely in the Health Service Executive), followed by the education sector with approximately 98,450.

Public service employees

Largest single public sector bodies by employees

Civil service

The civil service of Ireland consists of two broad components, the Civil Service of the Government and the Civil Service of the State. While this partition is largely theoretical, the two parts do have some fundamental operational differences. The civil service is expected to maintain political impartiality in its work, and some parts of it are entirely independent of Government decision making.

Current Government of Ireland

Leo Varadkar was nominated as Taoiseach by Dáil Éireann on 14 June 2017, and after his appointment by the president, the Dáil approved the appointment of the new government later that day.

	Office	Name	Party		Term
Cabinet ministers
	Taoiseach Minister for Defence	Leo Varadkar	style="background-color: Template:Fine Gael/meta/color;" rowspan="9" |	Fine Gael	2017–present
	Tánaiste Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade	Simon Coveney	2017–present
	Minister for Finance Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform	Paschal Donohoe	2017–present
	Minister for Justice and Equality	Charles Flanagan	2017–present
	Minister for Health	Simon Harris	2017–present
File:Joe McHugh TD.jpg	Minister for Education and Skills	Joe McHugh	2018–present
	Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment	Richard Bruton	2018–present
	Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation	Heather Humphreys	2017–present
	Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine	Michael Creed	2017–present
	Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport	Shane Ross	style="background-color: Template:Independent/meta/color;" |	Independent	2017–present
	Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection	Regina Doherty	style="background-color: Template:Fine Gael/meta/color;" rowspan="4" |	Fine Gael	2017–present
	Minister for Rural and Community Development	Michael Ring	2017–present
	Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government	Eoghan Murphy	2017–present
	Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht	Josepha Madigan	2017–present
	Minister for Children and Youth Affairs	Katherine Zappone	style="background-color: Template:Independent/meta/color;" |	Independent	2016–present
Also attending Cabinet
	Government Chief Whip Minister of State for Gaeilge, the Gaeltacht and the Islands	Seán Kyne	style="background-color: Template:Fine Gael/meta/color;" rowspan="4" |	Fine Gael	2018–present
	Minister of State at the Department of Defence	Paul Kehoe	2011–present
	Minister of State for Higher Education	Mary Mitchell O'Connor	2017–present
	Minister of State for European Affairs	Helen McEntee	2017–present
	Minister of State for Disability Issues	Finian McGrath	style="background-color: Template:Independent/meta/color;" |	Independent	2016–present

See also

• Irish cabinets since 1919
• Politics of the Republic of Ireland

References

1. "Ministers and Secretaries Act, 1924 (Section 2 – Ministers to be corporations sole and to have certain powers.)". Attorney General of Ireland. 1924. Retrieved 22 January 2011.
2. Constitution of Ireland, Article 28.1
3. Constitution of Ireland, Article 28.2.2.
4. Constitution of Ireland, Article 28.2.1.
5. ^ O'Toole, John; Dooney, Sean (24 July 2009). Irish Government Today. Gill & Macmillan Ltd. p. 9. ISBN 9780717145522.
6. "Ministers and Secretaries (Amendment) (No. 2) Act, 1977 (Section 4 – Amendment of Interpretation Act, 1937)". Attorney General of Ireland. 1977. Retrieved 22 January 2011.
7. "Ministers and Secretaries (Amendment) Act 1939 (Section 4 – Minister without portfolio)". Attorney General of Ireland. 1939. Retrieved 22 January 2011.
8. ^ "The Appointments". The Irish Times. 11 March 2011. Retrieved 7 September 2011.
9. "Finian McGrath willing to enter government with Sinn Féin or Fianna Fáil". Irish Examiner. 4 January 2019. Retrieved 23 March 2019.
10. "Taoiseach Leo Varadkar announces new Cabinet positions". RTÉ News. 14 June 2017. Retrieved 23 March 2019.
11. Doyle, Oran (2018). The Constitution of Ireland: A contextual analysis. Hart Publishing. p. 53–54. ISBN 9781509903436.
12. Constitution of Ireland, Article 28.10.
13. Constitution of Ireland, Article 13.2.2º.
14. Constitution of Ireland, Article 28.11.
15. "Statement by Taoiseach – Dáil Éireann (26th Dáil) – Thursday, 29 June 1989". Houses of the Oireachtas. Retrieved 16 February 2020.
16. "Appointment of Taoiseach and Nomination of Members of Government – Dáil Éireann (26th Dáil) – Wednesday, 12 July 1989". Houses of the Oireachtas. Retrieved 10 August 2019.
17. "Resignation of Taoiseach – Dáil Éireann (27th Dáil) – Tuesday, 15 December 1992". Houses of the Oireachtas. Retrieved 15 August 2019.
18. "Appointment of Taoiseach and Nomination of Members of the Government – Dáil Éireann (27th Dáil) – Tuesday, 12 January 1993". Houses of the Oireachtas. Retrieved 18 January 2020.
19. "Resignation of Taoiseach and Ministerial Changes: Statement – Dáil Éireann (27th Dáil) – Tuesday, 22 November 1994". Houses of the Oireachtas. Retrieved 15 August 2019.
20. "Appointment of Taoiseach and Nomination of Members of the Government – Dáil Éireann (27th Dáil) – Thursday, 15 December 1994". Houses of the Oireachtas. Retrieved 13 January 2020.
21. "Resignation of Taoiseach – Dáil Éireann (32nd Dáil) – Tuesday, 22 March 2016". Houses of the Oireachtas. Retrieved 14 January 2020.
22. "Appointment of Taoiseach and Nomination of Members of the Government (Motion) – Dáil Éireann (32nd Dáil) – Friday, 6 May 2016". Houses of the Oireachtas. Retrieved 14 January 2020.
23. "Nomination of Taoiseach – Dáil Éireann (33rd Dáil) – Thursday, 20 February 2020". Houses of the Oireachtas. Retrieved 28 February 2020.
24. Constitution of Ireland, Article 28.3
25. Devanney v. Shields [1997] IEHC 167, 1 IR 230; 1 ILRM 81 (31 October 1997), High Court (Ireland)
26. "Department of Public Expenditure & Reform - Databank - Public Service Numbers". Department of Public Expenditure & Reform. Retrieved 8 January 2017.
27. "Oireachtas Debates Nomination of Taoiseach (Resumed) (Continued) Wednesday, 14 June 2017". Houses of the Oireachtas. Retrieved 5 December 2017.
28. "Appointment of Taoiseach and Nomination of Members of Government Wednesday, 14 June 2017". Houses of the Oireachtas. Retrieved 5 December 2017.
29. "List of Ministers and Ministers of State". Department of the Taoiseach. Retrieved 20 July 2019.

External links

• Government of Ireland e-portal
• Merrionstreet.ie Irish Government news service
• List of ministers and ministers of state
• Ireland's Government and Economy at EuroLearn.org

• Politics of the Republic of Ireland
• European governments
• Government of the Republic of Ireland