Mr. Damien Geoghegan:

My first point relates to bureaucracy, on which Senators Boyhan and Casey touched. As it states in my presentation to the committee, we have to guard against what might be termed "plan fatigue". As councillors we spend a great deal of our time considering an increasing multitude of plans. There is the well-established county development plan, local area plans and corporate plans and now we have the local economic and community plans. We need strategies and frameworks to ensure we develop our localities in ways that are purposeful and progressive. It is probably true to say that we have been too reactive in Ireland when it comes to development, making localised interventions but not putting together a broader vision. However, let us not go to the opposite extreme, where so much time is spent constructing plans and so much more time co-ordinating a growing labyrinth of documents that we lose focus on the common-sense realities of delivering the services that the public needs. In a nutshell, that is what we encounter as public representatives.

My second point relates to the primacy of the role of the elected member of a council. The County and City Management Association and the officials in the Custom House are the people with the real power in local government. The executive, and our membership across the political spectrum, believes that power has been taken away from the elected member. The power of local authority members has been diminished and continues to be diminished across a broad range of areas. We have PPNs, LCDCs, Leader committees and SPCs and, while local authority members sit on those committees, the only people who have a direct mandate from the public are the elected members of the councils and that has to be respected.

Of course we have to interact with community groups, business groups, and chambers of commerce and they need to have their say. The feeling among elected members of local authorities is that they are being squeezed out and it has to be rectified. It has been happening for a number of years. That is the point I want to make today on behalf of the membership of the Association of Irish Local Government.