Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 30th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview WG10: Politico-Administrative Relations in CEE Author(s) Bernadette Connaughton University of Limerick Limerick Ireland Title Understanding institutional responses and policy advice in a crisis: The Irish core executive and the Covid 19 pandemic File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Bernadette Connaughton Abstract Responding to crisis would appear to be ‘business as usual’ when one considers the economic, societal and environmental governance challenges of twenty-first century European governance. The list is ‘impressive’ in that it includes economic crisis and complexity, climate change, migration, Brexit and Covid 19… When considering the impact of crisis on the functioning of government, the COVID-19 pandemic stands out as a crisis ‘in extremis rather than sui generis’ (Ansell et al. 2021, p. 949). As in other European states, the governance of the pandemic in Ireland projected significant attention on how specific policy decisions are reached and the roles of specific actors in how public health guidance is made and applied. From March 2020 a caretaker government steered the COVID response until the programme for government was agreed on 26th June, at which point the entire leadership base for the pandemic shifted in the new Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Green Party administration. The structures remained largely intact, however, and from 2020 they consisted of a governance apparatus encompassing a range of advisory groups feeding into a National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET) chaired by the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) who, along with several of his colleagues, became a household figure. This paper traces the Irish politico-administrative responses to the pandemic by applying the conceptual framework outlined by Kuhlmann et al (2021) in a comparative study to analyse Covid 19 crisis governance. This focuses on three conceptual dimensions: (1) institutional context, administrative culture and path dependency, (2) governance arrangements and coordination mechanisms, and (3) actor strategies, solutions and opportunity management.
