By Business & Politics Editor Lucas Spicer.
Corruption isn’t always envelopes of cash.
According to Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer, 4% of people in Ireland report that they or someone they know has been asked for sex or a sexual act in interactions with public officials, a form of corruption that rarely enters public debate.
That statistic formed part of the discussion last week at DCU Business School’s Anti-Corruption Challenge, where students examined corruption risks in Ireland and developed policy proposals aimed at addressing them.
Professor Robert Gillanders, who leads the initiative, said it is easy to assume corruption is a problem that exists elsewhere.
“It’s very easy to talk about corruption as if it’s someone else’s problem. That’s usually a sign you haven’t thought about it very hard,” Gillanders said.
Ireland performs strongly in international corruption rankings, but Gillanders warns that this can create a false sense of security.
“Comparative comfort can breed complacency. Corruption risk isn’t about national character. It’s about institutional design, where discretion sits, how oversight works, and whether accountability mechanisms are credible.”
The Anti-Corruption Challenge brings together DCU students and visiting participants from across the European Consortium of Innovative Universities (ECIU) network. Rather than writing essays, students work in interdisciplinary teams to design specific anti-corruption interventions aimed at real policy challenges identified in Ireland.
“They don’t write an essay about why corruption is bad,” Gillanders explains.
“They have to come up with a specific intervention aimed at a specific Irish problem, grounded in theory and evidence. It has to make sense economically. It has to be implementable. And they have to defend it under questioning,” he added.
Instead of a traditional final exam, the module focuses on designing policy responses, presenting proposals, and evaluating the ideas of peers. Students work collaboratively throughout the week before presenting their interventions and defending them under questioning.
“It’s closer to how policy design and practice actually works,” Gillanders said.
“Imperfect information, trade-offs, and people asking awkward questions.”
Several student proposals explored how corruption risks may evolve alongside technological change, including the misuse of sensitive data systems, governance challenges in institutions, and ethical risks linked to artificial intelligence.
While technology can help reduce opportunities for corruption, Gillanders notes that it can also introduce new vulnerabilities.
“Some digital systems reduce corruption opportunities. Others create new ones. The key question is always: who has power, how transparent is it, and who is monitoring it?”
At the start of the challenge, many students associate corruption primarily with dramatic bribery scandals. Over the course of the module, that understanding tends to change.
“Most corruption risk is structural and often quite mundane, poorly designed procurement systems, unmanaged conflicts of interest, weak oversight,” Gillanders explained, “It’s about incentives embedded in institutions, not just bad individuals behaving badly.”
Behavioural factors also play a role. Social norms, expectations about what others are doing, and even small frictions in reporting systems can influence how corruption emerges, meaning solutions may involve redesigning systems rather than simply increasing penalties.
For Gillanders, the broader lesson of the challenge is clear.
“Corruption affects us all and we will never get rid of it entirely. But we can make improvements in anti-corruption and in people’s lives by taking it seriously and working together, ideally across disciplines and borders.”
For the students involved, the challenge offers an opportunity to engage with one of the most complex issues in governance and public policy, while testing how academic insights can be translated into practical solutions.
Image Credit: Robert Gillanders