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Politics by Numbers is a brand-new series for The Journal where broadcaster, author and spreadsheet stan Gavan Reilly takes a data deep dive into a political point of the week.
AS TDs APPROACH the grand staircase that forms the main entrance to the Dáil chamber, they will be met twice along the way by tables with stacks of grey booklets. At both the main reception desk just off the lobby, and at another table just beside the main door, they will find stapled reams that outline all the day’s parliamentary questions.
As a physical edifice, they are a bit of a relic: few people have need to pick up a physical copy any more; a soft copy of the questions booklet is usually available in advance on the Oireachtas intranet, and a PDF version is uploaded to its website at 5.15am for all to see. But those who pick up the hard copy on their way into the chamber, or the adjoining media workspaces, will have noticed a trend in recent months.
The booklet is getting bigger and bigger, and those responsible for processing and answering those questions are beginning to struggle with the load.
As of last Thursday, before the Oireachtas broke for a 12-day recess, a total of 41,185 questions had been lodged this year – an average of 858 questions for every day the Dáil has met so far in 2026.
On the average day, there is only enough time for about 15 to be answered aloud; the rest are all responded to in writing with their answers placed on the Dáil record.
This is a significant surge, relative to the last couple of years. By this stage in 2024, a total of 24,580 questions had been lodged, an average of 522 per day. Last year, even though the newly-elected Dáil was only bedding in and a government still being formed, the total had increased to 29,166, or 711 per sitting.
Officials across the public sector have never had to deal with so many queries being lodged.
Some TDs are more prodigious than others in pursuing this. By far the most prolific questioner is Ken O’Flynn of Independent Ireland: in the month of May alone, he lodged 2,122 questions for answering. Most TDs would historically go an entire year without tabling quite so many.
Readers may have two natural responses to this. One may be: what’s it costing us to answer all these questions? A good question.
And the answer is: we don’t know.
There was an attempt, in 2017, to get a grasp on this. The independent TD Mattie McGrath (yes, through a series of parliamentary questions) asked all 15 members of cabinet, across all 17 departments, what it cost them to answer any question that came their way.
Simon Harris, then running the Department of Health, was the only one who could reply with a hard figure: each written question cost, on average, €77 to answer. Or, at least, that’s what it had cost in 2011, the last time someone had tried to do the sums.
Other ministers said an estimate would be too hard to offer. Katherine Zappone, then the minister for children, neatly summarised the situation: “The number and level of staff, and the time spent on individual replies, depends on the complexity and urgency of the issues raised, the ease of access to the required information, and the degree of cross-Divisional coordination required in preparing the reply.”
In other words: every question is different. A question on the status of a certain promised Bill should be easy to answer. Asking for a cost breakdown over multiple years of a specific aspect of a specific programme as deployed within a specific constituency takes a little longer.
Even Simon Harris gave a caveat to his estimate: many of the questions put to his Department have to be referred to the HSE, who would incur their own costs in answering.
The same is true of questions to the Department of Justice asking about internal resourcing of An Garda Síochána. And because Leinster House operates as a sort of switchboard for these, funnelling all the questions and answers through the same office, there is a cost to the Oireachtas too. There are so many variables and agencies involved that wrangling all of them into a solid sum is nigh on impossible.
The second question – even if you can’t put a financial cost on PQs – might be: is it worth it? That’s an even harder one to answer. On one level, you could frame the question. What would it cost for these questions not to be answered? There simply isn’t time every week for all 38 ministers to take questions from all 135 backbenchers and opposition, so written questions are a valuable tool of accountability.
But increasingly, officials are concerned about the opportunity cost of this workload – what they are unable to do, because of the resources tied up with questions. TDs will commonly ask about a constituent’s place on a surgical waiting list, or when children might get services from the local mental health or disability teams in their area. Getting an answer to those questions means having to get answers from a clinician or practitioner on the ground, and those officials are beginning to buckle under that load.
One person, familiar with the mechanics of local health services on the ground, says the likes of CAMHS mental health administrators – who desperately want to spend more time delivering services – are being held back by the volume of TDs’ queries they’re expected to answer.
The Dáil’s Reform Committee is due to meet next week, and the management of PQs has now been added to its agenda, but nobody is quite sure exactly what to do. Any cap on the number of PQs a deputy can table, per week or per day, constrains their ability to get answers for their constituents.
Increasing resources within individual departments, at a time when they’re being asked to squeeze more efficiency from their existing budgets, is a bit of a no-go. Others have suggested banning AI-generated questions, which both prejudges the provenance and background of questions that might still be perfectly legitimate.
Either way, as is so often the case across the public sector, the authorities within government have a capacity problem – and nobody knows how to fix it.
Gavan Reilly is the Political Correspondent for Virgin Media News and the host of Monday with Gavan Reilly, which airs every Monday at 10pm on Virgin Media Play and Virgin Media One.
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