JUST 11 stage agencies under the direct control of government departments have been abolished since the An Bord Snip Nua report.

Dozens of quangos and government bodies were supposed to face the axe in an attempt to cut departmental budgets. However, progress has been extremely slow: the number of agencies has been reduced from 214 to 203.

Only a handful of quangos have been abolished, most of them tiny organisations that were relatively easy to scrap. Some agencies that were slated for the chop – such as the National Consumer Agency (NCA) – are still awaiting rationalisation. Among the NCA's board members are Bertie Ahern's former partner Celia Larkin.

The Department of Finance even managed to increase the number of agencies under its control with the setting up of Nama.

"Every state agency needs to justify its continued existence and whether it is doing a good job for the taxpayer," said Fine Gael's Jim O'Keeffe. "There are simply far too many of them and there appears to be an awful lot of duplication in their work.

"As part of my work on the Public Accounts Committee, we have seen a lot of excess in some of these state bodies but for whatever reason, the vast majority of them appear to be surviving. We need a more forceful approach to this but I don't see any evidence of that from the current government."

The Department of Transport did manage to dissolve the Dublin Transport Authority but then replaced it with the National Transport Authority. It is one of seven bodies under the aegis of Minister Noel Dempsey and there are no plans for more rationalisation.

There are 28 bodies under the control of the Department of Justice and none of them has been axed. The department said "secretarial support" had been removed from three offices involved in censorship and classification. It also said the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner will be subsumed into the department this year.

"We are actively examining where common services or other resources can be shared to obtain efficiencies and reduce costs," the Department said.

The Department of the Taoiseach has also failed to eradicate any quangos but said the National Economic and Social Forum and the National Centre for Partnership and Performance would be absorbed into the National Economic and Social Council.

At Mary Coughlan's Department of Enterprise, there are 22 quangos in operation, with no reduction in the past year. The department said it is working on a bill to merge the Competition Authority and the National Consumer Agency and that an amalgamation of the Company Registration Office and the Registry of Friendly Societies was "under consideration".

The Department of Health has made some progress in abolishing state agencies: three bodies – the National Council on Ageing, the Women's Health Council and the Crisis Pregnancy Agency – were all subsumed last year. Four more small agencies will disappear this year pending legislative changes, with the National Cancer Screening Service and National Cancer Registry also set to be transferred into the HSE.

There was no change in the number of quangos under the control of the departments of communications, foreign affairs or arts, sport and tourism.

The Department of Defence has rid itself of one quango, Coiste an Asgard, chiefly because the board's sail training vessel sank in 2008.