In spite of the explosion of literature concerning the phenomenon of agencification in recent years (cf. Verhoest et al 2011), the relationship between changes in institutional design and changing political preferences remains an elusive and complex puzzle for students of public administration. In this paper, a dataset of Irish state agencies covering a 90-year period is exploited with a view to improving our understanding of how political saliency affects the use of agencies, and their governance arrangements. The paper builds on some recent publications by the author (MacCarthaigh 2012a, 2012b) concerned with longitudinal analysis of the aforementioned dataset, and instead focuses on some case studies to explore these issues according to discrete policy fields and functional tasks. Agency reforms that have occurred in the context of the financial crisis are of particular interest here, including changes to autonomy and the role of Boards.
