Fine Gael has published proposals it claims would cut duplication in the work carried out by State agencies and save taxpayers about €200 million over four years.
In a report entitled Streamlining Government, the party said over 200 government agencies and other government bodies had been established in the past 10 years.
Fine Gael said there were almost 500 state agencies, boards, authorities, committees and ‘quangos’ at national level, with a further 500 at regional and local level.
The impact of this “explosion” had been an increase in the cost of government, wasteful spending and “less accountability” for the delivery of key services.
It said it had identified 26 bodies that could be merged into 11, another 13 that could be abolished altogether, four that could share administrative or other facilities and seven that “could become obsolete” over the next decade.
The party claimed the “diminution of local government by Fianna Fáil since 1979” had forced the creation of new State agencies to fill the vacuum.
“We now have 35 city and county development boards, 38 area partnerships, 10 regional drug taskforces and 14 local drug taskforces,” the report said.
Fine Gael TD Leo Varadkar said the party was not proposing to “sack” people working in the public service but that about 1,000 job cuts could be achieved through streamlining and voluntary redundancy.
"Nobody's going to be sacked. It is not our agenda or our proposal to sack people from the public service. What we would like to see is two things happen. People could be reassigned to front-line services, and in other cases, redundancies. Obviously those redundancies would have to be negotiated with the unions.
"We would be talking about roughly 1,000 but nobody's going to be sacked."
Among the bodies he said could be abolished were the Public Service Benchmarking Body and the Review Body on Higher Remuneration.
Mr Varadkar said he believed "even the unions" now believed benchmarking did not work and he did not believe there would be any great difficulty in abolishing the bodies. He said, however, a replacement would have to be negotiated with the unions.
Fine Gael also said it would ensure that all appointments to public bodies made by Ministers would be laid before the Dáil and that the individuals appointed would be qualified for the posts.
It said at present there were some 2,416 people appointed to serve on the board of a State agency on the direct nomination of Government ministers.
“While many of these appointees are highly qualified and capable people, the whole system is undermined by the large number of appointees who owe their position to personal connections with a particular minister or a history of logistical or financial support for a particular political party,” the report said.
The party proposed an Office of Fair Trading, comprising the current Competition Authority and the National Consumer Agency. It would also set up a single Transport Regulator and abolish two existing utilities regulators.