Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the CCMA delegation. I have questions and concerns about Irish Water. For now, the local authorities will have the service level agreements, SLAs. Have they a concern? As a former town and county councillor, I have a concern about this service. While the talk is about providing an integrated network, that would require cross-county connections in places such as Dublin. Some would argue they will not be required, but they will. In the rest of the State that is a debatable point. Are the witnesses concerned that the SLAs may move away from them? Once the meters are installed outside every house they will be under a company called Bord Gáis. Much of that is in the current Government's NewERA document. That poses a significant concern for people. The councillors and county and city managers will be like subcontractors.

We are led to believe, in the Bill and elsewhere, that the property tax will go to councils. In a previous discussion here this morning it was mentioned that there is no new money. If councils raise money through property tax they will receive that much less from central Government in local government funding. Have the managers concerns about the fact that we have started badly this year and next year because the councils will not receive it? Some €240 million has been put into a different bag straight away.

I have a question on the reserve and executive functions. I do not raise this in a combative way. I know there is always a healthy tension in councils. In the council on which I served we had a good relationship with the county manager, Mr. Peter Carey. He was inclined to give councillors as much rope as he could and we gave him a good bit of rope also, not to hang each other but to give as much slack as possible to perform our powers, functions and duties. What functions would CCMA like to see transferred from the executive to the reserve domain of the councillors, if any?