Councillor Michael O'Brien:

I apologise; the Senator is correct. There will be 40 people sitting around the table and deciding on the distribution of the funds. For the State as a whole, it will, for the first time in many cases, be a case of local government in action. There will be only one source of resources for a county, although retaining the county system might not have been the best strategy. We should have done what they did in Northern Ireland and Scotland, for instance, and forget about towns and counties. However, the decision was made to retain the counties and the five cities, to make up a total of 31, and the members of each unit will decide on the fair and equal distribution of whatever funds are available in that particular county.

The main difficulty is that we have inherited a system in which nobody can tell how the local government fund is actually distributed. It would appear to be done on a historical basis, with each allocation being generally 1% or 2% greater or lesser than it was the previous year. Where distortions have arisen in the past, they have arisen when the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government has been able to lever a little more funding for a particular county. This takes it out of synch with the rest of the county councils when it comes to the next allocation, because that allocation is dependent on historical figures.